Hi there! Welcome to my third blog post. In this post, I will share about my progress of the current capstone project. To begin with, my project is to design and develop an ‘Animal Dating App for Adoption’. The title sounds like a cool project, right? That’s why I chose it 😉 Also, I love to work with React and build a web application. So, that’s another reason 🙂
My contribution to this project would be in building a backend. That’s build databases and implementation of APIs. As a first step to the project, we have to decide what database should we choose. The first thing that came to my mind was to go with a MySQL database. But upon further research, we decided to go with DynamoDB to leverage all the advantages it had. To give something, DynamoDB is easy to setup and it’s free.
Ok, we decided to use DynamoDB. Now what, how am I gonna configure and construct the tables? I was looking at several videos and lectures from Coursera and other platforms. There were a lot of different ways to set it up. One way was to manually configure it and add lambda functions to get and put data, from the UI. That didn’t feel good to me. It would be difficult to maintain the DB, when every time we have to login to AWS and look into different tables and associated functions etc.
And the other way was to use CloudFormation. CloudFormation is a services for creation and management of AWS resources. It lets you write a YAML/JSON file, where we would state all the resources that we need, lambda functions, Databases, API, IAM roles, literally every resource that you would need to for the application stack. It also allows you to change the state of the resources and version control of the serverless infrastructure. This sounded like a good way to go. I liked how we build and maintain the entire infrastructure as a code.
Awesome. The next thing I was looking for is how to create this YAML file. Serverless framework to develop, deploy the application was the perfect choice. After installing serverless and configuring my AWS account using IAM access key and secret, I was able to create a boilerplate template easily. That’s it. The next thing would be edit the YAML template to configure the required resources and deploy it using a single command.
Sounds cool and really easy right? I have the boilerplate template set up and as my next task I would be configuring my database and deploy it. I’ll update my progress in my next blog post.
Bubyee!!
