Full Stack Serverless

Chapter 6. Serverless Functions In-Depth: Part 1

In Chapter 2, you learned how to create and interact with a serverless API using API Gateway and AWS Lambda. Here, you’ll continue to learn about how to use serverless functions by creating two new types of functions. The functions in this chapter will be different in that, instead of using them as strictly a web server or an API, you’ll be using them to interact with other AWS services to aid in the application-development process.

You’ll be creating the following two kinds of functions in this chapter:

A function that dynamically adds a user to a group based on their email address

In some applications, you will need to perform “coarse-grained” access control, which typically means granting certain permissions to users in a broad way based on the type of role or group they are associated with. In our example, we’ll have an administrator group of users that will be identified by their email address. If a user signs up with one of these email addresses, we will place them in a group called Admin.

A function that automatically resizes an image after it has been uploaded to Amazon S3

Many applications require dynamic image resizing on the server after a user has uploaded an image. This is done for many reasons, ranging from the need to make the web application more performant by compressing images to the need to dynamically create avatars or thumbnail images of a smaller size for images.

In Chapter 7, we’ll continue learning ...