How to build Serverless .NET Core API with AWS and Vertica

Overview

Data storage is the most important part of any big data analytics solution. How you transform, store and access your data is the most important decision you’ll make when building such systems. These choices require compromises, but with a smart approach, we can build APIs to allow access to any type of data storage.

Let’s imagine you’ve created a platform that’s been working well for several years. But new technologies are released every minute, and someday you’ll want to renew your architecture to apply all these modern improvements.

In our case, we have a Vertica distributed analytical database. It’s hosted on AWS cloud along with the other components of our platform. We have a customer facing business analytics portal, which uses an API to get data from Vertica. The API service was built with ASP.NET WebAPI technology and hosted on an EC2 instance.

Our goal was to make our API highly available (HA) and scalable, so we decided to go with a Serverless approach. But at the same time, we wanted to keep refactoring scope small. Our ideal case was to just move the existing .NET source code…