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

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