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Setting Up Serverless Framework with AWS

Welcome to the beginning of our journey into the world of real-time serverless chat applications. In this first installment of our series, we’ll lay the foundation by setting up the Serverless Framework and configuring it to work seamlessly with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

What we’ll cover

Why Serverless Framework ?

Before we dive into the technical details, let’s briefly discuss why we’ve chosen the Serverless Framework for our project.
The Serverless Framework is a powerful tool that simplifies the development, deployment, and management of serverless applications. It abstracts away many of the complexities involved in building serverless architectures, allowing us to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure.

Some key advantages of the Serverless Framework include: 

  • Ease of Use : It provides a straightforward and developer-friendly way to define serverless functions, APIs, and resources using a configuration file.
  • Multi-Cloud Support: While we’re using AWS for this series, the Serverless Framework supports multiple cloud providers, making it highly versatile.
  • Automatic Scaling: Serverless applications automatically scale with usage, ensuring that our chat application can handle a growing number of users without us worrying about server management.
  • Cost-Effective: You only pay for the resources you use, making serverless applications cost-effective, especially for projects with variable workloads.

Now that we understand why the Serverless Framework is a great choice, let’s roll up our sleeves and start setting it up with AWS.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place:

  • AWS Account: You’ll need an AWS account to create and manage the necessary services. You can follow this guide to create and configure your AWS account.
  • Node.js and npm: Ensure that you have Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) installed on your development machine. You can download them from the official website.
  • AWS CLI: Install the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and configure it with your AWS credentials. You can follow instructions listed in this guide.
  • Serverless Framework: Install the Serverless Framework globally on your machine using npm. You can do this by running the following command:
npm install -g serverless

Creating a New Serverless Service

Now that we have our prerequisites in order, let’s create a new Serverless service for our chat application. 

  • Open your terminal or command prompt and navigate to the directory where you want to create your project.
  • Run the following command to create a new Serverless service.
serverless create --template aws-nodejs-typescript --path serverless-chat-app

This command creates a new directory called serverless-chat-app with a basic project structure using the aws-nodejs-typescript template and a sample AWS Lambda function written in Node.js.

  • Navigate into the newly created directory

cd serverless-chat-app

Deploying the Service

Now that everything is set up, it’s time to deploy our Serverless service to AWS. Run the following command:

serverless deploy

The Serverless Framework will package and deploy your service, creating the necessary AWS resources based on your configuration.

Testing your Deployment

To verify that your deployment was successful, check the output in your terminal for the API Gateway endpoint URL. You can use tools like curl or Postman to make HTTP requests to this endpoint.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up the Serverless Framework with AWS and deployed your first serverless service. In the upcoming blog posts, we’ll dive deeper into building the serverless backend and creating a real-time chat application that leverages this foundation. You can always refer to this step by step guide to build a Serverless REST API with Typescript using the Serverless Framework

In our next blog post, we’ll design the serverless backend architecture for our chat application. If you have any questions or encounter any issues during the setup process, feel free to ask in the comments below.

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