2 First steps to serverless

To give you an understanding of serverless architectures, you’re going to build a small, event-driven serverless application: specifically, a video-encoding pipeline. Your service will transcode videos, uploaded to an S3 bucket, from their existing format, resolution or bit rate to a different format or bit rate (kind of like YouTube only without the frontend website).

To build this video-encoding pipeline, you will use AWS Lambda, S3, and Elemental MediaConvert. Later, if you so desire, you can build a frontend around it, but we’ll leave that for you as an exercise. If you want to see how we’ve done it ourselves, you can refer to our first edition that covers the frontend in some detail.

2.1 Building a video-encoding pipeline

In this section, you’ll begin to build a small, event-driven serverless application. At a high level, you’ll learn the following in this chapter:

2.1.1 A quick note on AWS costs

2.1.2 Using Amazon Web Services (AWS)

2.2 Preparing your system

2.2.1 Setting up your system

2.2.2 Working with Identity and Access Management (IAM)

2.2.3 Let’s make a bucket

2.2.4 Creating an IAM role

2.2.5 Using AWS Elemental MediaConvert

2.2.6 Using MediaConvert Role