In this workshop you will use Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB and a variety of other AWS services to build a Customer Ticketing application so we can provide a great experience to Wild Rydes users.
The Wild Rydes team wants this application to meet the following requirements:
- Users must be able to submit and view support tickets
- Users must be able to log in with their Facebook user id
- The application should use an entirely serverless architecture (we don't have an operations team to manage our infrastructure!)
- The application must be able to failover to another region in the case of a
disaster. The RTO and RPO must both be less than 15 minutes.
- RTO: Recovery time objective – the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster.
- RPO: Recovery point objective – the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from a service due to a major incident.
The application will utilize three layers:
- A UI layer built using HTML, Javascript and CSS and hosted directly from AWS S3
- An API layer built using Node.js running on AWS Lambda and exposed via Amazon API Gateway.
- A data layer storing customer tickets in DynamoDB.
For the purposes of this workshop, our failover is focused on the path from our application (in this case, a web application) through API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB. We do not address replication of the website UI layer itself to a second region, although this could be achieved using something like S3 Cross Region Replication.
The backend components will be replicated to the second region so that we can failover in the event of a disaster. In addition, all data in DynamoDB will be replicated from the primary region to the secondary region using DynamoDB Global Tables ensuring that our application data will be available when we failover.
A few additional components will be utilized to assist us including AWS Cognito to allow the application to authenticate users and authorize access to the API layer. AWS Route53 will be used for DNS and will allow us to perform health checks on our primary region, and upon detecting an issue, automatically switching to our secondary region using Route53 DNS updates.
This workshop is broken up into multiple modules. In each, we will walk through a high level overview of how to implement or test a part of this architecture. You will expand sections for detailed command or console instructions.
We will be using the following two regions for this workshop. Please remember these and check before creating resources to ensure you are in the correct region:
- Primary:
eu-west-1(Ireland) - Secondary:
ap-southeast-1(Singapore)
Using the two regions above for this workshop is mandatory. We will start with eu-west-1 (Ireland). You will not deploy anything in ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) until Module 3.
(please read these carefully and do not jump ahead and start setting things up unless specifically called out)
In order to complete this workshop you'll need an AWS Account with access to create AWS IAM, EC2, Cognito, CloudFront, Cloud9, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway. The code and instructions in this workshop assume only one participant is using a given AWS account at a time. If you try sharing an account, you'll run into naming conflicts for certain resources - we do not recommend this as there ma be unpredictable results or difficult to identify configuration issues.
You will also need to either purchase a domain, or repurpose an existing unused domain you already own. You will need to delegate DNS to Route53 if the domain is not already acquired through AWS. You may also need access to the email account associated with the domain name registration or to the DNS server assigend to the domain in order to prove you own the domain when creating SSL certiticates in Amazon Certificate Manager.
(re:Invent 2018 participants - please see the workshop team if you need to "borrow" a domain in order to complete the workshop)
Our application requires a Facebook federated identity to allow users to login with an existing account. In order to set this up you will need a Facebook Developer account. You may set up the account now, but do not start configuring anything else yet.
You can sign up using this link.
Note that you will create the App ID later on in this guide using the website URL you will set up in Module 2. You may delete the Facebook account once you have completed the workshop.
In order to remove as many dependencies as possible and not rely on the specific configuration of a workshop participant's Windows, Mac, or Linux workstation, we will be utilizing the Amazon Cloud 9 IDE. This will ensure that you have everything you need in one place as you work your way through each module.
- Included in the Cloud9 IDE: AWS CLI, Git, VI/VIM, Node.js, NPM, Python and anything else you might need to complete the workshop.
We recommend you use the latest version of Chrome or Firefox when testing the web application UI.