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Serverless REST APIs with DynamoDB

With Pulumi, you can combine infrastructure definitions and application code in one program. The @pulumi/cloud library is a set of Pulumi components that provide a higher-level abstraction over AWS. So, instead of provisioning an API Gateway instance, Lambda functions, and setting up IAM roles, you can use cloud.API and define application code at the same time as the infrastructure it depends on.

In this tutorial, we’ll show how to create a simple REST API that counts the number of times a route has been hit. To implement this API, we need a key-value store, an API endpoint, and a Lambda function.

Prerequisites

1. Install Pulumi
2. Configure AWS credentials

Create a simple REST API

1. Run pulumi new:

   $ mkdir hello-http && cd hello-http
   $ pulumi new aws-javascript

2. Replace the contents of index.js with the following:

   const cloud = require("@pulumi/cloud-aws");
   
   // Create a mapping from 'route' to a count
   let counterTable = new cloud.Table("counterTable", "route");
   
   // Create an API endpoint
   let endpoint = new cloud.API("hello-world");
   
   endpoint.get("/{route+}", (req, res) => {
       let route = req.params["route"];
       console.log(`Getting count for '${route}'`);
   
       // get previous value and increment
       // reference outer `counterTable` object
       counterTable.get({ route }).then(value => {
           let count = (value && value.count) || 0;
           counterTable.insert({ route, count: ++count }).then(() => {
               res.status(200).json({ route, count });
               console.log(`Got count ${count} for '${route}'`);
           });
       });
   });
   
   exports.endpoint = endpoint.publish().url;
   

   The definition for counterTable stores a counter for each route, using cloud.Table. On AWS, this provisions a DynamoDB instance. To create a new API Gateway instance, we create an instance of cloud.API. New routes can be added to this endpoint using methods like get, post, put etc.

   The function passed to get is the interesting part: this becomes the body of a new AWS Lambda function that is called on a GET request to the API Gateway. The body of this function can use variables defined in the main program, such as counterTable. This is translated to a lookup on the provisioned DynamoDB instance; there is no need to store its ARN in an environment variable.

3. Add and install the NPM dependencies:

   $ npm install --save @pulumi/cloud @pulumi/cloud-aws

4. Preview and deploy changes via pulumi up:

   $ pulumi up
   Previewing update of stack 'hello-http'
   ...
   
   Updating stack 'hello-http'
   ...
   
   info: 14 changes performed:
       + 14 resources created
   

5. View the endpoint URL and curl a few routes:

   $ pulumi stack output
   Current stack outputs (1):
       OUTPUT            VALUE
       endpoint          https://5e8xrktey3.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/stage/
   
   $ curl $(pulumi stack output endpoint)/hello
   {"route":"hello","count":1}
   $ curl $(pulumi stack output endpoint)/woohoo
   {"route":"woohoo","count":1}

6. To view the runtime logs of the Lambda function, use the pulumi logs command. To get a log stream, use pulumi logs --follow.

   $ pulumi logs --follow
   Collecting logs since 2018-05-01T21:22:59.000-07:00.
   
   2018-05-01T22:25:05.040-07:00[           hello-world4fcc7b60] Getting count for 'hello'
   2018-05-01T22:25:05.188-07:00[           hello-world4fcc7b60] Got count 1 for 'hello'
   2018-05-01T22:25:13.562-07:00[           hello-world4fcc7b60] Getting count for 'woohoo'
   2018-05-01T22:25:13.704-07:00[           hello-world4fcc7b60] Got count 1 for 'woohoo'
   

Clean up

Before moving on, tear down the resources that are part of your stack to avoid incurring any charges.

1. Run pulumi destroy to tear down all resources. You'll be prompted to make sure you really want to delete these resources. A destroy operation may take some time, since Pulumi waits for the resources to finish shutting down before it considers the destroy operation to be complete.
2. To delete the stack itself, run pulumi stack rm. Note that this command deletes all deployment history from the Pulumi Console.

Next steps

For an end-to-end application with a frontend, see the URL shortener sample.