Going Serverless With AWS Lambda

If you are new to AWS, or new to AWS Lambda, this book will help flatten the learning curve and make you design solutions of enterprise class. All you need is a very basic level of understanding of Python.Setting up the environment : One of the biggest hurdles in using Lambda is how to set up everything on your laptop and on your AWS account. This book explains each step in great detail, including: 1. Setting up of a VPC, NAT Gateway, IAM roles for AWS Lambda, Security Groups, Subnets (public & private), Internet Gateways, Route tables, etc. 2. Setting up of an RDS instance 3. Setting up RESTful services via the API Gateway that connect to Lambda functions 4. Setting up of a Linux code server and installing the Python virtual environment 5. Setting up of a Windows server and installing MySQL Workbench 6. Creation of automation scripts for upload of Lambda programs 7. Configuring the laptop to connect to AWS 8. Configuring Cloudwatch to trigger Lambda functions Understanding AWS Lambda : The main topic of this book, this explains how to use Lambda functions to perform multiple tasks, including: 1. Database connectivity (RDS) 2. Working with both Standard & FIFO Queues (SQS) 3. Sending notifications (SNS) 4. Performing facial recognition (Rekognition service) 5. S3 interactions & triggers 6. Working with Excel files (create and read) via S3 & Lambda functions Creating an enterprise-class solution: The true power of Lambda comes when used to solution an end-to-end business requirement, which is what was done the author at Tata Capital and presented at the AWS Mumbai Summit in 2017. This same design methodology has been explained in detail using a simple cricket team and ranking project, which also performs the task of facial recognition of team players based on JPG files. The solution also covers the automatic synchronization of data between two databases on different servers (which is a painful challenge), using queues and Lambda functions. And here is the punchline: The entire project has no dedicated server, and everything is coded using serverless Lambda functions and other services of AWS mentioned above! This is zero maintenance stuff About the Author Ajay is the Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Tata Capital Financial Services Limited, with over 27 years of experience in the Information Technology field. Passionate about technology, he was responsible for introducing Tata Motors Limited as well as Tata Capital Limited to the public cloud (AWS). His current areas of exploration & innovation are focused around Neural Networks, Facial Recognition, Serverless technology, and Docker (for containerization). Ajay has been a speaker and a panelist at multiple technology forums, including the AWS Summits.