Hands-On Guide to Building an App in AWS

In this chapter, you will combine many concepts you learned about in previous chapters to build a practical, e-commerce serverless architecture for a fictional online store called AWSome Store. After reading this chapter, you should be able to build your application using some or all of the components that you will review in this chapter.

For many of the services, you can plug and play and pick and choose the services that will be used in the application you develop. For example, your application may be more user-centric and may not require any asynchronous services. In this case, you can pull the asynchronous component out of your architecture. However, including some of the services in your architecture is highly advisable. For example, suppose your application is going to have a front end. In that case, you will want to ensure that you have an authentication component so that every user is authenticated before using any other application...

An introduction to the use case

This chapter will allow you to combine and practice many concepts we have covered throughout this book. You’ll need to design the architecture of your system to scale without impacting application performance. You can use a serverless architecture, which involves building small, independent functions triggered by events, such as changes in a database or the arrival of a new message. This allows you to scale your system as needed, paying only for the resources you use.

To build upon your existing knowledge, let’s go into more detail about implementing domain-driven design for a retail e-commence application use case that you learned about in Chapter 14, Microservice Architectures in AWS, under the section Domain-Driven Design. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to understand the use case.

To make it a fun learning experience, we’ll give a name to the retail store we will use to learn AWS, let’s name it AWSome...

Building architecture in AWS

Now that you understand different domains and relationships, lets take a shot at building an architecture diagram using AWS services. AWS offers several services that you can use to build a robust, scalable, and resilient system. For example, you can use Amazon Lambda to build serverless functions, Amazon DynamoDB to store data, Amazon S3 to store files, and Amazon API Gateway to create APIs. Also, implementing proper error handling and retry logic is crucial for building a resilient and robust system with AWS Lambda.

To allow for the quick implementation of new features, you’ll need to implement a CI/CD pipeline that automatically builds, tests, and deploys new code to production. Let’s look at AWSome Store’s proposed architecture using AWS cloud-native services:

Figure 16.3: AWS cloud-native architecture to build AWSome Store

As shown in Figure 16.3, AWS provides various cloud-native serverless technologies to implement...

Setting up services

To initiate the development of an application, the initial step involves establishing the essential infrastructure services. As you have chosen to utilize AWS services extensively, these services can be configured via various means, such as the AWS Console, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), AWS CloudFormation, the Command Line Interface (CLI), or through third-party tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, etc.

In this section, the main emphasis is on how to use these services while building cloud-native applications rather than constructing the infrastructure itself. Therefore, this chapter will focus on the process of setting up services utilizing CLI. You will go through the following steps to implement AWSome Store in AWS:

1. Set up an AWS account
2. Install the AWS CLI
3. Set up IAM users, roles, and groups
4. Create the AWS infrastructure
5. Implement authentication and authorization for end customers
6. Define database attributes...

Optimization with Well-Architected Review

You learned about the well-architected review in Chapter 2, Understanding the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Getting Certified. A well-architected review report is a comprehensive review of your AWS infrastructure and applications, designed to help you improve the robustness, security, and performance of your solutions.

A typical well-architected review report would include a summary of your current architecture and recommendations for improvement in each of the six pillars. The report would also include a list of best practices and guidelines for ensuring that your solutions are well-architected. Here are some best practices to consider when setting up the AWS infrastructure for your use case:

• Use AWS Organizations to manage multiple AWS accounts for production, testing, and development purposes. In this chapter, you deployed your app in a single dev account, but for production and test environments, you may want to have...

Summary

In this chapter, you have put together many of the technologies, best practices, and AWS services we have covered in this book. You weaved it together into an e-commerce website architecture that you should be able to leverage and use for your own future projects.

You built architecture using AWS services following domain driven-design. You learned about implementing various AWS services, including IAM, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, and using the AWS CLI. You learned several best practices, along with a well-architected framework to optimize your architecture.

As fully featured as AWS has become, it will continue providing more services to help large and small enterprises simplify their information technology infrastructure. You can rest assured that AWS is creating new services and improving the existing services by making them better, faster, easier, more flexible, and more powerful, as well as by adding more features.

As of 2023, AWS offers 200+ services...