Introduction

Serverless computing has garnered a lot of interest in recent years, owing its popularity to a host of benefits including quicker packaging and deployment, easier scalability, less software complexity, and decreased operational costs when compared to traditional server-dependent architectures.

This mini ebook, featuring the first three chapters of Serverless Applications with Node. js, will get you on your way to learning to build serverless web apps. In the first chapter, you’ll get an introduction to core concepts of serverless as well as when and why to use it, and you’ll take a look at the features the Node.js library Claudia offers for developing serverless applications.

You’ll go hands-on in the second chapter as you build a serverless pizzeria API with Claudia and deploy it to AWS Lambda and API Gateway. Building on the basic concepts you learned in the previous chapter, you’ll look more closely at what Claudia is doing under the hood as you structure and deploy your API.

Once you’ve built your API, which you’ve programmed with features to create, update, and cancel pizza orders, you’ll need a way to store them, and that’s where chapter 3 comes in. Since Node.js executes asynchronously, you’ll discover how serverless affects asynchronization and how it works with Claudia. You’ll also see how easy it is to connect AWS Lambda to an external service. Then you’ll use it to store your pizza orders with AWS DynamoDB.

This quick-start guide has plenty of examples, exercises, and tips to help lock in the concepts you’ll learn along the way, making it a great place to start learning to build serverless web apps. If you want to delve further into serverless development, chapter 4 of Serverless Applications with Node.js continues on with topics including debugging, leveling up your API, building a serverless chatbot, and more. Congratulations on taking this step toward learning these valuable serverless development skills!