Serverless Web Application Architecture Using AWS
Serverless Web Application
Architecture Using AWS
Project Overview:
The customer, an American multinational manufacturing company, sought to build a
highly scalable, secure, and cost-effective web application. The company wanted a
solution that could efficiently handle dynamic API-driven functionalities while ensuring a
seamless user experience. Their core requirements included robust backend services,
high availability, and low operational overhead.
Challenges:
The primary challenges included:
● Designing a solution capable of handling dynamic API requests with
backend business logic.
● Ensuring data persistence and reliability.
● Managing scalability for both frontend static content and backend APIs
with minimal operational complexity.
● Optimizing cost while maintaining high performance and security.
Proposed Solution & Architecture:
The project involved building a fully serverless web application architecture using
Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver a highly scalable, secure, and cost-effective
solution for a web-based event management platform. The architecture was designed
to handle high traffic loads while ensuring fast response times and data integrity.
Architecture:
Architecture Components:
1. Amazon Route 53: Route 53 resolves incoming DNS requests and routes
them to AWS CloudFront, ensuring highly available and reliable domain
name resolution for the web application.
2. Amazon S3: Amazon S3 hosts the static website content, including HTML,
CSS, and JavaScript for the Single Page Application (SPA). CloudFront
caches these static assets at edge locations, ensuring quick and efficient
delivery to end-users.
3. AWS CloudFront: CloudFront serves as the global content delivery network
(CDN), distributing both static and dynamic content to users from edge
locations. It improves performance for geographically distributed users by
caching content closer to them, reducing latency, and providing SSL
termination for secure traffic.
4. Amazon API Gateway: API Gateway provides the API layer for the
application, handling HTTP requests and routing them to the appropriate
5.
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AWS Lambda functions. CloudFront caches API responses, improving
performance and reducing the load on API Gateway.
AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda handles the backend business logic in a fully
serverless manner. Each Lambda function has least-privileged access
using IAM roles, ensuring it can only perform necessary operations,
enhancing security.
Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL): Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL) serves as the
persistent data storage layer, storing event and user data. The managed
database service ensures high durability, scalability, and availability.
AWS X-Ray (Distributed Tracing): AWS X-Ray is enabled for tracing
requests across the architecture, providing visibility into service
interactions. This helps the development team troubleshoot backend API
issues and optimize performance.
API Logging & Throttling: API Gateway throttles requests based on
predefined patterns to manage traffic spikes. Logs are captured efficiently
without overwhelming the log ingestion system, with logging levels
controlled dynamically via environment variables.
Key Enhancements:
● Security: AWS Lambda functions are granted least-privileged access,
adhering to security best practices. CloudFront adds an extra layer of
security with SSL termination, and it integrates well with AWS security
services for enhanced protection.
● Performance Optimization: CloudFront’s global edge locations ensure
quick response times for both static and dynamic content. Caching API
responses reduces the load on API Gateway and backend services,
improving performance and cost efficiency.
● Cost Optimization: The serverless architecture, coupled with CloudFront
caching and dynamic scaling, ensures that costs scale based on actual
usage. Unnecessary logs are minimized to reduce storage and ingestion
costs.
● Troubleshooting: AWS X-Ray provides distributed tracing, helping to
quickly identify and resolve any performance bottlenecks or failures within
the backend.
Conclusion:
By leveraging a serverless architecture using AWS CloudFront, Lambda, API Gateway,
and S3, the solution achieves scalability, security, and cost-efficiency. The global
caching provided by CloudFront enhances the performance for distributed users, while
serverless technologies ensure minimal operational overhead, making the architecture
highly adaptable to variable traffic loads.