February 12, 2024: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose has been renamed to Amazon Data Firehose. Read the AWS What’s New post to learn more.

Developers tell us they want to know how to easily build and manage their serverless applications. In 2017 AWS announced AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) to help with just that. To help developers learn more about SAM, I created a weekly Twitch series called Sessions with SAM. Each session focuses on a specific serverless task or service. It demonstrates deploying and managing that task using infrastructure as code (IaC) with SAM templates. This post recaps each session of the first season to prepare you for Sessions with SAM season two, starting August 13.

Sessions with SAM

What is SAM

AWS SAM is an open source framework designed for building serverless applications. The framework provides shorthand syntax to quickly declare AWS Lambda functions, Amazon DynamoDB tables and more. Additionally, SAM is not limited to serverless resources and can also declare any standard AWS CloudFormation resource. With around 20 lines of code, a developer can create an application with an API, logic, and database layer with the proper permissions in place.

20 Lines of code

By using infrastructure as code to manage and deploy serverless applications, developers gain several advantages. You can version the templates and rollback when necessary. They can be parameterized for flexibility across multiple environments. They can be shared with development teams for consistency across developer environments.

Sessions

The code and linked videos are listed with the session. See the YouTube playlist and GitHub repository for the entire season.

Session one: JWT authorizers on Amazon API Gateway

In this session, I cover building an application backend using JWT authorizers with the new Amazon API Gateway HTTP API. We also discussed building an application with multiple routes and the ability to change the authorization requirements per route.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/http-api

Video: https://youtu.be/klOScYEojzY

Session two: Amazon Cognito authentication

In this session, I cover building an Amazon Cognito template for authentication. This includes the user management component with user pools and user groups in addition to a hosted authentication workflow with an app client.

Building an Amazon Cognito authentication provider

We also discussed using custom pre-token Lambda functions to modify the JWT token issued by Amazon Cognito. This custom token allows you to insert custom scopes based on the Amazon Cognito user groups. These custom scopes are then used to customize the authorization requirements for the individual routes.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/cognito

Video: https://youtu.be/nBtWCjKd72M

Session three: Building a translation app with Amazon EventBridge

I covered using AWS SAM to build a basic translation and sentiment app centered around Amazon EventBridge. The SAM template created three Lambda functions, a custom EventBridge bus, and an HTTP API endpoint.

Architecture for serverless translation application

Requests from HTTP API endpoint are put into the custom EventBridge bus via the endpoint Lambda function. Based on the type of request, either the translate function or the sentiment function is invoked. The AWS SAM template manages all the infrastructure in addition to the permissions to invoke the Lambda functions and access Amazon Translate and Amazon Comprehend.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/eventbridge

Video: https://youtu.be/73R02KufLac

Session four: Building an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for ingesting website access logs

In this session, I covered building an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose for ingesting large amounts of data. This particular application is designed for access logs generated from API Gateway. The logs are first stored to an Amazon DynamoDB data base for immediate processing. Next, the logs are sent through a Kinesis Data Firehose and stored in an Amazon S3 bucket for later processing.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/kinesis-firehose

Video: https://youtu.be/jdTBtaxs0hA

Session five: Analyzing API Gateway logs with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics

Continuing from session 4, I discussed configuring API Gateway access logs to use the Kinesis Data Firehose built in the previous session. I also demonstrate an Amazon Kinesis data analytics application for near-real-time analytics of your access logs.

Example of Kinesis Data Analytics in SAM

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/kinesis-firehose

Video: https://youtu.be/ce0v-q9EVTQ

Session six: Managing Amazon SQS with AWS SAM templates

I demonstrated configuring an Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue and the queue policy to control access to the queue. We also discuss allowing cross-account and external resources to access the queue. I show how to identify the proper principal resources for building the proper AWS IAM policy templates.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/SQS

Video: https://youtu.be/q2rbHMyJBDY

Session seven: Creating canary deploys for Lambda functions

In this session, I cover canary and linear deployments for serverless applications. We discuss how canary releases compare to linear releases and how they can be customized. We also spend time discussing pre-traffic and post-traffic tests and how rollbacks are handled when one of these tests fails.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/safe-deploy

Video: https://youtu.be/RE4r_6edaXc

Session eight: Configuring custom domains for Amazon API Gateway endpoints

In session eight I configured custom domains for API Gateway REST and HTTP APIs. The demonstration included the option to pass in an Amazon Route 53 zone ID or AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) certificate ARN. If either of these are missing, then the template built a zone or SSL cert respectively.

Working with Amazon Route 53 zones

We discussed how to use declarative and imperative methods in our templates. We also discussed how to use a single domain across multiple APIs, regardless of they are REST or HTTP APIs.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/custom-domains

Video: https://youtu.be/4uXEGNKU5NI

Session nine: Managing AWS Step Functions with AWS SAM

In this session I was joined by fellow Senior Developer Advocate, Rob Sutter. Rob and I demonstrated managing and deploying AWS Step Functions using the new Step Functions support built into SAM. We discussed how SAM offers definition substitutions to pass data from the template into the state machine configuration.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/sessions-with-aws-sam/tree/master/step-functions

Video: https://youtu.be/BguUgdZwymQ

Session ten: Using Amazon EFS with Lambda functions in SAM

Joined by Senior Developer Advocate, James Beswick, we covered configuring Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) as a storage option for Lambda functions using AWS SAM. We discussed the Amazon VPC requirements in configuring for EFS. James also walked through using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) to aid in configuration of the VPC.

Code: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-lambda-efs-samples

Video: https://youtu.be/up1op216trk

Session eleven: Ask the experts

This session introduced you to some of our SAM experts. Jeff Griffiths, Senior Product Manager, and Alex Woods, Software Development Engineer, joined me in answering live audience questions. WE discussed best practices for local development and debugging, Docker networking, CORS configurations, roadmap features and more.

SAM experts panel

Video: https://youtu.be/2JRa8MugPCY

Session twelve: Managing .Net Lambda function in AWS SAM and Stackery

In this final session of the season, I was joined by Stackery CTO and serverless hero, Chase Douglas. Chase demonstrated using Stackery and AWS SAM to build and deploy .Net Core Lambda functions. We discuss how Stackery’s editor allows developers to visually design a serverless application and how it uses SAM templates under the hood.

Stackery visual editor

Code only examples

In addition to code examples with each video session, the repo includes developer-requested code examples. In this section, I demonstrate how to build an access log pipeline for HTTP API or use the SAM build command to compile Swift for Lambda functions.

Conclusion

Sessions with SAM helps developers bootstrap their serverless applications with instructional video and ready-made IaC templates. From JWT authorizers to EFS storage solutions, over 15 AWS services are represented in SAM templates. The first season of live videos supplements these templates with best practices explained and real developer questions answered.

Season two of Sessions with SAM starts August 13. The series will continue the pattern of explaining best practices, providing usable starter templates, and having some fun along the way.

#ServerlessForEveryone