Writing an Event-driven Serverless Application with Full Local Development Experience

In my previous post on Anatomy of a Serverless Application, I lay the foundation for building a very simple application with an email service using the Serverless Framework, deployed to AWS Lambda.

In this post, we will build mailman, an event-driven serverless application. The application has a simple frontend using curl that calls into a couple of backend services: a users service and an email service. The post will highlight event-driven application development with focus on full local development experience. We will look at services emitting, subscribing and reacting to events in a seamless manner using the Serverless Application Platform.

You will learn how to:

• Setup the development environment
• Create an application project
• Create a users service
• Create an email service
• Write an event-driven application
• Run the serverless services locally
• Run the full application locally

Getting Started

We will look at an important aspect of writing serverless applications, i.e. local development support. We touched upon the fact that Serverless Framework helps with local testing of a serverless service by using sls invoke. But, the real productivity gain is the ability to write a serverless, event-driven application…