A complete tour for beginners to set up a full-stack application.

When I first started learning about AWS I thought of it as dark wizardry. Every time I touched the topic there was so much to learn that I immediately stopped, not knowing how to proceed.

That’s why I’ve created this step-by-step tutorial of creating a full-stack application using AWS. We will after this tutorial have a frontend, backend that speaks to a database, and an API.

There are a few ways of communicating with AWS, in this tutorial we will use the services web-consoles. Web consoles are user-friendly web applications that let the user manage and set up the AWS services. For me, learning AWS felt a bit overwhelming since many tutorials used the AWS CLI. The AWS CLI is a command-line tool that does the same thing as the web consoles. I do suggest the AWS CLI if you are going to spend much time with AWS, but the web consoles offer a more easy learning curve.

What is AWS and Serverless?

AWS is a Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Cloud IaaS) platform run by Amazon. This cloud has services available to help developers perform computing inside the cloud. This means that as a user you can set up a service, for instance, a webpage. The webpage is then run by the cloud and managed by them as well.

So when you read serverless, it doesn’t mean there is no server. There just is no server involved for the users. The users (developers) don’t need a server to run and execute their code, it’s all done by the servers inside the cloud.

Think of it as leasing a car, you pay to use someone else server, they handle the services.

The reasons to use a serverless approach according to  AWS is as follows.

• No Server Management — No maintenance, no administration
• Scaling — Scaling the application is done automatically as it needs more memory or throughput.
• Pay for Value — Pay only for what you use.
• Automated high availability — The applications are run in an environment that provides high fault tolerance.

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