Deploy Again

In this chapter, you learned how to build custom web services using Amazon Lambda. You saw two different methods for accessing these services and used them from two different environments (the command line and the browser). Since you’ve already deployed our new service, there’s nothing more to do! If you want to try to integrate this new service into our app, you can experiment with some of the techniques we covered in previous chapters.

Next Steps

Now that you understand how Lambda works, here are some additional topics you might want to investigate.

Cognito User Validation

When creating a Cognito user pool, you can specify Lambda functions that are invoked when a user logs in or when a new user signs up. These functions can be used to validate user data before creating an account, to initialize database entries, or to send a custom confirmation message. User pools are a new addition to Cognito and offer more integration points than identity pools. See the Cognito documentation^[72] for more details.

API Gateway

The API Gateway is also a new addition to Amazon Web Services, and its functionality is still growing. We saw one use of it in this chapter, but there are many others. For example, in addition to Lambda services, you can use Amazon EC2 as an endpoint. You can also use custom web services as endpoints. Keep an eye on this service,^[73] and see if you can find other ways to use it.

Kappa, then Lambda

Kappa^[74] is a command-line tool that automates some of the tasks we covered in this chapter. It creates IAM roles and Lambda functions, creates and deploys code bundles, and even lets you test your function with mock data, just as we did in the AWS console.

Deploying Lambda Functions to S3

Rather than updating the code for each individual function, you can deploy your code bundle to an S3 bucket. When all your code is contained in a single bundle, as ours is, this can make a lot of sense. See the AWS documentation for more details.^[75]