Tutorial for building a Web Application with Amazon S3, Lambda, DynamoDB and API Gateway

I recently attended Serverless Day at the AWS Loft in downtown San Francisco. During the workshop section we built a serverless web application for requesting Unicorns to come pick us up. The AWS team provided excellent documentation on Github and Rahul Sareen gave a one of the best presentations I have heard at a tech event overviewing Serverless application architecture. (Slides for that presentation are available here).

In the workshop portion we created and deployed a website that utilized S3 for hosting, DynamoDB for a database, API Gateway for RESTful endpoints and Lambda functions as our backend server processing.

This tutorial covers my notes from building out the application and using some of these services for the first time on Serverless Day 2017. More detailed notes for following along are available on the github and the Wild Rydes demo application is live at http://www.wildrydes.com/.

Step 0: About WildRydes

The application we are going to create in this tutorial is called Wild Rydes. The application is a fictional service for ordering unicorns to come pick us up. Users can login to the application and request unicorns from their current location. The application then dispatches a unicorn to pick up the user.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Step 1: Identity Access Management

As with most AWS tutorials, the first step is to create an IAM user that will create and provision our AWS resources. I have a user set up that has AdminAccess. It is considered best practice to login using such an user rather than logging into and managing your AWS resources using your root account credentials. If you have no idea what I’m talking about I suggest checking out the A Cloud Guru course for passing the AWS Certified Developer — Associate exam. Chapter 3 provides easy to follow video instructions on setting up users for your AWS account.