Anatomy of a Serverless Application

We’ve all been new to serverless before. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to get up and running on your first application. Let’s cut through the docs, shall we?

This application will be a backend email service that can be called over HTTP from a simple frontend like curl. You will learn how to:

• Setup the development environment
• Create an application project
• Create a serverless service using a boilerplate template
• Run and test the service locally
• Deploy the service
• Run the service via the public HTTP endpoint
• Perform basic validation and error handling

Getting Started

I had been following serverless technologies for a while, and skimmed over the provider documentation and examples. It was really helpful to know the lay of the land and what was available out there. AWS Lambda’s getting started documentation was helpful but overwhelming, and it was tedious to use the AWS Console. I wanted to use my own development workflow — code using my favorite editor, build using an easy to use toolchain, do a test/debug cycle, and finally deploy.

I had to make some choices before I started development:

• Programming language: NodeJS (my familiarity, all serverless platforms support it)
• Platform: AWS Lambda (most popular and mature, lots of…