Book Review: Full Stack Serverless by Nadir Dabit
Looking to improve my skills in architecting serverless cloud applications on AWS, I purchased Full Stack Serverless: Modern Application Development with React, AWS, and GraphQL. If you do not have much experience with Servlerless Application architectures on AWS, this is an excellent book. If you have designed architectures for or built serverless applications in the past, this book is not worth the price.
Review
This book is a good introduction to serverless application architecture and implementation using AWS Amplify, but most of the materials can be found online for free in the AWS Amplify Docs (not mentioned in the book's title).
This book provides several examples of what a serverless application architecture can achieve. While there are several frameworks out there for developing modern serverless applications, this book focuses entirely on the AWS Amplify toolkit. It was written by an AWS Developer Advocate (at the time), Nader Dabit, and provides a gentle introduction to Serverless Application Architectures.
Considering the level of this material (introductory to early intermediate), I wish I had known that it was so focused on AWS Amplify prior to purchasing this slim, 164 page book. The list price for this book is $59.99 and marked down to $35.70 new. For this price, I was expecting some more sophisticated topics. Most of this material can be found on the AWS Amplify Docs for free, or through other sources (e.g., Serverless Stack)
Topics Covered
- Introduction to AWS Amplify
- Authentication and Authorization with AWS Cognito (via AWS Amplify)
- REST APIs
- GraphQL APIs
- React-based front-ends (static site)
- AWS Amplify front-end React UI components
- Implementing and deploying AWS Lambda (Function as a Service) with AWS Amplify
- Event-based backends (e.g., S3 event to trigger a Lambda)
- Amplify DataStore
- AWS AppSync
- A series of implementations with front-end, back-end and authentication/authorization implemented with this architecture and tooling (note this lacks operational management such as productionized logging, monitoring and analytics, which are an afterhtought in the last chapter)
Topics Lacking
- Logging in depth
- Monitoring
- Analytics (e.g., monitoring an SLA, log correlation, custom analytics)
- Architecting for Scale (e.g., General AWS Limits)
Recommended References
If you are interested in purchasing this book, I recommend reviewing free online resources for an equally valuable treatment of the materials.