About 3 years ago I learnt some basic Python, which I've used almost exclusively to build back-end APIs on AWS Serverless, mostly Lambda. This includes a monitoring solution on AWS, an event-driven API integration solution, a load shedding telegram bot, a Slack bot that posts AWS News, a CDK project, and other telegram bots. None of them are front-end web apps, and thats something that has always been a gap for me. Some years back I did some Ruby on Rails, but did'nt build anything meaningful, and I've since forgotten most of it. So I've decided to learn Flask as a tool to build some web apps: primarily because its still python, and a micro-framework with a minimal learning curve. And I wanted to re-use what I've learned building python back-end apps and APIs on AWS Serverless, and see how I can build front-end apps and APIs that run on AWS Serverless. Admittedly, Flask is still server-side, which means I'm still avoiding client-side web apps (React, etc), but baby steps for now.
There are other AWS service that can be used to run Flask on AWS, like using EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS or Lightsail. But I am specifically looking to use serverless because I don't want to manage servers or containers, I only want to to pay for what I actually use without having resource on all the time (and with the generous free tier for serverless on AWS you wont pay anything to run this tutorial), I want to fully automate the deployment process, and if I eventually have to scale, I don't want to have to re-architect anything. Serverless has a much better Developer Experience, and allows you to quickly build things with less hassle.
So in this series of posts, we will learn to build some Flask apps on AWS, and figure things out along the way. I'll probably get some stuff wrong, so Errors and omissions excepted. Onwards!
Part 1: https://hacksaw.co.za/blog/flask-on-aws-serverless-a-learning-journey-part-1/ Part 2: https://hacksaw.co.za/blog/flask-on-aws-serverless-a-learning-journey-part-2/