How To Build a Serverless API With DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and API Gateway

AWS all the things!

Last week I wrote a guide to building a simple Serverless API . This piece goes into more depth by building a fully functional Serverless CRUD API that utilises DynamoDB. In this guide, we’ll build an API that has the following operations:

• GET /books
• POST /books
• GET /books/{id}
• PUT /books/{id}
• DELETE /books/{id}

This tutorial will use mainly use the AWS User Interface. If you want to read a guide on how to build this app with Infrastructure as Code, please see my article here.

Technologies Used

This guide uses the following technologies:

• AWS Lambda for running code without provisioning servers
• AWS API Gateway for Serverless API creation & management
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for creating a role for the Lambda functions we will build
• AWS DynamoDB for a managed NoSQL database

Database Setup

Log in to AWS and navigate to the DynamoDB service. Then click Create table: