AWS Summit 2019 - Session 7: Serverless - College Board app

They used

• serverless
• ReactJS
• DynamoDB
• Congnito

AWS Fargate - fully managed container service, options for scaling
decompose for agility
microservices
two pizza team - teams big enough
belts and suspenders - governance and templates, flexibility instead of enforcement
IaC

AWS CodePipeline
Commit > Build > {Testing} > Deploy > X-Ray (Monitoring)

Use Cloud Development Kit to write out infrastructure with CloudFormation, then that sets up the pipeline

AWS SAM - server application model
Use of DynamoDB

Cognito -
connects to a bunch of stuff, has lots of policy options, can hook to Lambda

AWS Amplify - JS library declarative interface for stuff like auth
basically the toolkit if you're writing an Amazon app

College Board

• College Board might be a good parallel to us, given how they work with multiple colleges etc
• Scholarships timed out over period of time to motivate and engage students to carry them through
  • nudges at critical points througout their junior and senior year
• custom app with path
  • each path point links to a website that has the content they want, presuming they built feedback loop as well to get confirmation back
  • data-wise they are tracking a lot of activities from students #### Process
• quarterly planning cycle
• made scrum team
  • "as a team they want to build an SPA so that can learn about Catapault" - an internal labelling of Cognito
• 191 calendar days (133 business days)
  • 105 days - commitment to having it done
• App Structure:
  • 
  • 12 microservices coordinated with SQS and SNS
    • 98 Lambdas
    • one RDS for reporting purposes
  • ReactJS
• Principles (north stars)
  • identifying core values when decoupling
  • 25 features for the whole project, 10 were the MVP
  • started as 7 person team, grew to 30 in six months - no wonder it only took 6 months
  • comfort with refactoring
    • Bias to Action - not getting so focused on flexibility that you don't do anything
  • culture of learning
  • product vision
    • bricks, walls, cathedrals
    • looking at backlogs to see where they were going

Devops
webhook from Github to CodeCommit -> Pipeline #important
instead of doing batch, do it as events warrant - like when a student actually comes in
Using CloudFront for SEO to host static copy, for them generated by React-Snap
Hardening session - what is going to break? Post-its for all the breaks, what can go down and still stay up?
went through the team, had them scale their concerns, then made a hit list

Their cost on opening day was $124 dollars