HTTP API Platform Exercise

A HTTP GET API that returns the current timestamp in a ISO8601 string, and also the region the server is running is as a JSON payload.

curl https://API_ID.execute-api.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/time

The Stack Choice

Developed using AWS CDK in TypeScript, a complete development kit tools for AWS environment, to define the cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning it through AWS CloudFormation.

Consideration

The AWS CDK puts the infrastructure, application code, and configuration all in one place and together with TypeScript can avoid incorrect assumptions about runtime behavior, or other errors.

Assumption

The AWS CloudFormation is one of the requirements, and because of it I decided not to go with third-party tools (Pulumi or Terraform) to define the cloud infrastructre as code. Otherwise, I would have choosen tools that use AWS API to provising the code, as they can be faster with less requiremnts.

Requirements

• AWS CLI - To configure the AWS Credetials.
• AWS CDK - To run the local commands and deploy the application.
• Docker - To run the local commands and deploy the application.
• nmv - to set up Node.js v16

Commands

• aws configure configure AWS CLI options
• yarn install install package.json dependencies
• yarn build compile typescript to js
• yarn watch watch for changes and compile
• yarn test perform the jest unit tests
• yarn format run a code formatter for entire application
• yarn cdk bootstrap provisions a CloudFormation stack called CDKToolkit (Required to deploy)
• yarn cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region
• yarn cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
• yarn cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template

Success and Reliability

This application is serverless microservice, it is a cloud-based service that uses serverless functions to perform highly specific roles, executes small segments of code in response to events, are modular and easily scalable, making them well-suited for microservice-based architectures. Also, it can be easily integrated with a range of managed services, which minimizes the overhead that is often associated with other microservice implementations.