Rocky Jaiswal - Free serverless applications (with persistence) the easy way

Free serverless applications (with persistence) the easy way

11/09/2021

For as long as I can remember I have been trying to look at cheap or free alternatives to host simple web applications backed by a database (or some form of persistence) which I build in my free time.

Back in the day, Heroku came close to meeting that promise but the free instance setup is quite poor in performance. So when I did my AWS certification I started looking more deeply into ways of utlizing serverless architecture/s for hosting weekend projects since AWS has a liberal free tier in this regard.

The answer now is simple - use a CDN (like CloudFront) + AWS Lambda + DynamoDB to host the frontend, API and datastore respectively. Since AWS has a liberal free tier and I do not expect any of my weekend applications to shake the world I think I can get by with paying (almost) nothing and yet building and hosting as many applications as I want. For a few hundred visitors for all my applications I can get away by paying almost nothing (maybe a few cents).

Since I even do not want to pay for a domain, I made one small change to this combination - use Firebase (instead of S3 + Cloudfront) for hosting the frontend since it provides a nice free URL as well. Examples -

and even this blog are hosted this way. So in the end I have a responsive PWA backed by APIs and a datastore all hosted for free and there is nothing stopping me from churning apps (which no one uses) in my free time. So my weekend project stack now is -

Firebase for hosting the React.js frontend
AWS Lambda for a GraphQL API (Node.js or JVM based) fronted by AWS API Gateway (for exposing Lambdas via HTTPS)
DynamoDB for persistence (close to zero cost for small amounts of reads / writes)

The only challenge with this setup is that it is DevOps heavy. All this requires scripts to maintain & deploy, but thanks to the Python + AWS CDK combo I can now get away with writing very little code and yet automating most of the DevOpsy part.

A fully working code / application is available here.

So let us break down some things that we need for this setup. From here on this post can also be titled as - "Running a DynamoDB backed GraphQL Service on AWS Lambda".

Writing the main GraphQL API

As evident from code here I have a AWS Lambda function which is exposed via AWS API Gateway as a GraphQL API. I am not going into details of how this works since it is quite simple - The HTTP requests ends up at the Lambda via the API Gateway. The API Gateway has some CORS configuration which you can see in the CDK code here.

The Apollo GraphQL library has a variation which allows it to run on AWS Lambda as shown here

The only difficult part of this was that I needed a main async handler for the Lambda. The code for this is -

import 'reflect-metadata'
import { ApolloServer } from 'apollo-server-lambda'

import bootstrapSchema from './schema'

export const handler = async (event: unknown, context: any, callback: any) => {
  const schema = await bootstrapSchema()

  const server = new ApolloServer({
    schema
  })

  const apolloHandler = server.createHandler()

  return await apolloHandler(event, context, callback)
}

The reason for this hackery is that my main Lambda entry point is async and there is no easier way to make it work with the default Apollo handler. I used type-graphql which forced my hand here.

DynamoDB for persistence

DynamoDB is also setup with AWS CDK as programmed here. Only the Lambdas have access to it so it is secure.

For writing the application code to persistence layer I used @aws/dynamodb-data-mapper to write some "decorator" (or annotation) based magic to get a nice persistence API. The downside is that the code looks a bit Java-ish but it does the job.

Deploying with CDK

To build the Lambdas, I use to some shell scripting to create a minimal zip file and then use AWS CDK to synth + deploy the latest code. All of this can be done for the command line (or from a CI/CD setup on a CircleCI free tier).

The Lambdas are be built by a simple command like -

yarn build:lambda

then using AWS CDK we "synth" and deploy them

env AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=1234 AWS_REGION=eu-central-1 npx cdk synth
env AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=1234 AWS_REGION=eu-central-1 npx cdk deploy

Conclusion

There you have it, a fully modern and (if needed) super scalable setup for a modern stack of React.js frontend + GraphQL API + DynamoDB based persistence all available in one repository with fully automated deployment.

Downsides