Chapter 3. Building a serverless application
This chapter covers
- Writing, testing, and deploying Lambda functions
- Creating a basic event-driven system for transcoding videos
- Using AWS services such as Simple Storage Service, Simple Notification Service, and the Elastic Transcoder
To give you a thorough understanding of serverless architectures, you’re going to build a serverless application. Specifically, you’ll build a video-sharing website, a YouTube mini clone, which we’ll call 24-Hour Video. This application will have a website with user registration and authentication capabilities. Your users will be able to watch and upload videos. Any videos uploaded to the system will be transcoded to different resolutions and bitrates so that people on different connections and devices will be able to watch them. You’ll use a number of AWS services to build your application, including AWS Lambda, S3, Elastic Transcoder, SNS, and non-AWS services such as Auth0 and Firebase. In this chapter, we’ll focus on building your serverless pipeline for transcoding uploaded videos.
Before we jump in to the nitty-gritty of the chapter, let’s step ahead and look at what you’re going to accomplish by the time you get to the final chapter. Figure 3.1 shows a 10,000-foot view of the major components you’re going to develop. These include a transcoding pipeline, a website, and a custom API. At the end, you’ll also have a full-fledged system with a database and a user system.