Serverless App Using API Gateways and Lambda

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to write a Pulumi program that creates a serverless app serving static content, in addition to dynamic routes in AWS Lambda. We’ll accomplish this using 5 lines of JavaScript, a few lines of configuration, and whatever static content we wish to serve. For this tutorial, we’ll go with a simple HTML page and a favicon. After seeing this in action, we’ll build on these basic concepts to explore additional containers, serverless, and infrastructure tutorials.

Prerequisites

1. Install Pulumi
2. Configure AWS credentials

Deploy the App

Step 1: Create a new project from a template

Create a project directory, ahoy-pulumi, and change into it. Run pulumi new hello-aws-javascript --name myproject to create a new project using the AWS template for JavaScript. Replace myproject with your desired project name.

$ mkdir ahoy-pulumi && cd ahoy-pulumi
$ pulumi new hello-aws-javascript --name myproject

Follow the project initialization prompts. You can accept the defaults, or change the values according to your setup. For instance, you can change the AWS region to us-west-2.

Step 2: Review your project files

After some dependency installations from npm, you’ll see the few files that have been generated from the initialization process.

Let’s review those files:

• Pulumi.yaml defines the project.
• Pulumi.ahoy-pulumi-dev.yaml is the configuration file for the stack you initialized in the previous step.
• www contains the sample static content for this tutorial.
• index.js is the key file for defining your stack resources (which we will look at in the next step).

Step 3: Review your stack resources

Normally, you would write some code to define the resources for your cloud stack, but the quickstart took care of that for you. Open up index.js using your preferred text editor.

const pulumi = require("@pulumi/pulumi");
const aws = require("@pulumi/aws");
const awsx = require("@pulumi/awsx");

// Create a public HTTP endpoint (using AWS APIGateway)
const endpoint = new awsx.apigateway.API("hello", {
    routes: [
        // Serve static files from the `www` folder (using AWS S3)
        {
            path: "/",
            localPath: "www",
        },

        // Serve a simple REST API on `GET /name` (using AWS Lambda)
        {
            path: "/source",
            method: "GET",
            eventHandler: (req, ctx, cb) => {
                cb(undefined, {
                    statusCode: 200,
                    body: Buffer.from(JSON.stringify({ name: "AWS" }), "utf8").toString("base64"),
                    isBase64Encoded: true,
                    headers: { "content-type": "application/json" },
                })
            }
        }
    ]
});

// Export the public URL for the HTTP service
exports.url = endpoint.url;

This example uses the @pulumi/awsx package in JavaScript and TypeScript to create a public HTTP endpoint, and define the static and event handler routes. See Module apigateway to learn more about Pulumi’s API Gateway module and components.

Step 4: Preview and deploy your resources

To preview your Pulumi program, run pulumi up. The command shows a preview of the resources that will be created and prompts you to proceed with the deployment.

$ pulumi up

Choose yes to create the resources in AWS. This may take a minute or two.

Since there was a stack export (via exports.url) in the code, pulumi up prints this in the output. You can easily curl this URL via pulumi stack output:

$ curl $(pulumi stack output url)

For a more interesting view that shows the result of calling a Lambda function, open the page in a browser:

Step 5: Manage the stack

The output also contained a permalink to the Pulumi Cloud. Select that link to review the stack in the web UI, examine logs and resource usage, and learn how you can invite friends and coworkers to collaborate on stacks.

Clean Up

Before moving on, tear down the resources that are part of your stack to avoid incurring any charges.

1. Run pulumi destroy to tear down all resources. You'll be prompted to make sure you really want to delete these resources. A destroy operation may take some time, since Pulumi waits for the resources to finish shutting down before it considers the destroy operation to be complete.
2. To delete the stack itself, run pulumi stack rm. Note that this command deletes all deployment history from the Pulumi Service.

Summary

You also learned how to work with the Pulumi CLI. To recap:

• Run pulumi new <cloud>-<language> --name myproject to create a new project from a language and cloud template.
• Run pulumi up to preview and update your infrastructure.
• Run pulumi destroy to clean up your resources.
• Run pulumi stack rm to delete your stack.

For a similar example in other languages and clouds, see the Pulumi examples repo.

Next Steps

• EC2 Linux WebServer
• Containers on ECS Fargate
• Serve a Static Website from S3