My Roller Coaster Journey in Learning Serverless
“Serverless is the future”
“Things i have learned using serverless”
“Best things about serverless”
“Switching to serverless”
etc.
Nowadays, so many stories about this so called Serverless are published. Coming from mobile app development background, i didn’t have a lot of back-end knowledge. But it didn’t stop my curiosity and i finally began my journey toward learning Serverless.
Starting my journey
Without any mentor or buddy that i can learn together with, it was a harsh and confusing journey. At first, i thought Serverless was all about the so called AWS, Google cloud and things like that (i was pretty foolish at first). I decided to start my journey using AWS.
I started doing Android Project that implements AWS feature using the AWS Mobile Hub and that is where things went wrong, all the documentation has driven me mad. The analytics that is hard to configure, using DynamoDB which is the only thing inside Mobile Hub, AWS Lambda feature that asked me to read more and more of the documentations. In the end i spent around 3 hours configuring my AWS and it didn’t work at all.
With no one that has AWS/Serverless expertise around to ask for, i was starting to give up. But then i found a saving grace, an article lying in Medium.
This framework called Serverless
Another day another journey, my dumb self has finally figured out that there is this framework called Serverless that will avoid you from reading all those AWS documentations.
Following the guide from the previous article (thanks to Adnan Rahic), i finally succeeded in making my first AWS Lambda endpoint API. I felt proud for that, it’s a small first step but everything starts from the first step.
But my journey today didn’t stop there, the next thing i was working with is the Database.
Working towards Database
Without a lot of back-end knowledge it was a hard time to figure out what DynamoDB is and how it works. Working around with it, i thought DynamoDB was similliar with Postgres or MySQL and i was having a hard time trying to create more that 2 columns in DynamoDB, which is actually not possible LOL.
After a couple of tweaking, i finally figured out that DynamoDB is a NoSQL database and it’s not the one that I was looking for. Yes i was pretty clueless, but in my defense i wasn’t an experienced back-end developer though ;P. Afterward, i found my way into RDS AWS, which provided me with Postgres database and it worked great, even though deploying an empty instance of database takes quite some time. But aside from that there is nothing to complain about.
End of the beginning
At the end of the day, i finally find myself working with Serverless AWS Lambda and AWS RDS. It was practically one hell of a roller coaster ride and it was a great experience learning that. It is now the beginning of my new journey in Serverless.
It didn’t take more than a week to start having your own server in AWS and most importantly you can use it for free! I urge you to start playing around with Serverless and leaving your mark in this world! Or at least you can put a mark in AWS, close enough.
Thanks for reading, hopefully you guys and girls enjoy reading my article. If you liked it, give me claps and i will really appreciate it!
