Infrastructure caveat

The general idea of this workshop is to show the basics of serverless app development with Python. Managing AWS infrastructure efficiently and with the correct tools is a secondary goal. That is why we will be using AWS CLI or simple Python scripts to provision infrastructure. Real-world projects would rely on some form of infrastructure-as-code (IaC), using tools like:

• AWS CloudFormation
• AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit)
• Terraform
• Pulumi
• Ansible

Create our DynamoDB table

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name $WORKSHOP_NAME-savealife-$ENV \
  --profile workshop \
  --attribute-definitions AttributeName=first_name,AttributeType=S \
  --key-schema AttributeName=first_name,KeyType=HASH \
  --billing-mode PAY_PER_REQUEST

With this command we created a DynamoDB table with:

• The primary key being first_name. We talked about primary keys on the DynamoDB 101 page.
• The BILLING_MODE set to PAY_PER_REQUEST. This basically means that our table will scale to $0 if there is no usage. It can also scale to $MANY if there is a lot of usage. Know your data access patterns.

Running the command from above will result in output similar to:

This step is crucial, please don’t proceed further if this step failed and ask for assistance.