Learning Serverless with AWS Amplify
Stephen Howell is an Developer Advocate on the AWS Academic Advocacy DevRel Team.
AWS London Summit
Last month I attended the AWS Summit London, and while the whole experience was awesome, the best part for me was chatting to students about how they use cloud services in their coursework projects.
Most tell me they are replicating their app 'infrastructure' that was running on their laptop, such as VMs, web servers and databases, in the cloud. This is the well understood 'lift and shift' model, and works well for students new to cloud. I always check if they have considered a serverless approach, and often students tell me they understand the concept, but are not sure how to go about implementing it their projects.
Friends, I'm an old-school developer who likes to build every part of my app so I have a complete understanding of every aspect of the app's stack. It's part of my learning process - I try to build something with a new technology while learning that language or stack. The challenge with this approach is that when you encounter as service that you are not an expert on, say, authentication and authorization on AWS, you can quickly be overwhelmed if you attempt to learn every single detail of every single service. Luckily, the clever builders in AWS have a solution for that to allow us to quickly prototype and deploy serverless apps on the cloud - AWS Amplify.
AWS Amplify
The official Amplify page states "AWS Amplify is a complete solution that lets frontend web and mobile developers easily build, ship, and host full-stack applications on AWS, with the flexibility to leverage the breadth of AWS services as use cases evolve. No cloud expertise needed.". For a student, this means that Amplify is a service that will rapidly increase their development speed, and help them understand how serverless components in an app fit together.
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I've developed a free foundational workshop that explains how to get started with AWS Amplify, and add authentication, authorisation, NoSQL storage, and serverless functions to your web apps. Don't worry if you do not have deep technical experience already, this is a foundational workshop, and assumes you are a beginner, not an expert.
Access it here: Workshop Studio: Building a Serverless Web App with Amplify.
If you are a student in further or higher education and want to develop your cloud skills, you should:
If you are an academic faculty teaching cloud skills or researching with cloud, the AWS Academic Advocacy Team can support you, please connect and DM me.