Production-Ready Serverless workshop

Production-Ready Serverless

Learn best practices for building production-ready serverless applications in this hands-on workshop.

By the end of the workshop, you should have a clear idea when serverless is a good fit for your system and common pitfalls to avoid.

It’s really easy to get started with serverless and to ship something to AWS. And there is plenty of content out there that help you do just that. But many people struggle with going beyond that and understand the long-term implications of their architectural decisions. Even if you’re already running serverless applications in production, are you still struggle with common challenges such as:

How do I run my Lambda functions locally?
How do I test them?
What’s the best way to secure my CI/CD pipeline and not leave administrator roles around?
How do I monitor my application and debug problems quickly when they arise in production (when I’ll be under immense time pressure)?

You are not alone in struggling to answer these questions.

Because the reality is, serverless is a very different paradigm to how we’re used to building systems.

What has got us here won’t help us get to where we want to be in the world of serverless. We need to understand how the platform really works, and how to choose between the different services AWS has to offer.

And there’s no better way to learn than to get your hands dirty and build something yourself. In this workshop, you will follow along with my instructions and build a web application step-by-step. Along the way you will learn how to:

implement server-side rendering
authenticate users with Cognito
securing internal APIs
testing strategies for serverless
CI/CD best practices
manage application configurations
security best practices
logging best practices
monitoring & alerting best practices
implement distributed tracing and capture correlation IDs

Production-Ready Serverless is by far the most comprehensive, concise, and up to date course for building real-world serverless applications. If you are looking for a true end to end guide that walks you through everything you need to know about building serverless applications, I highly recommend Yan Cui’s course.

Nader Dabit

Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, Author of "Full Stack Serverless"

Attended by students from these companies

What you will learn

I highly recommend this workshop - Yan shares his deep technical knowledge and experience from the trenches in designing, implementing and supporting serverless production systems. Anyone who is serious about learning how to deliver serverless systems should attend.

Iain MacLeod

Senior FullStack Engineer at SkyScanner

I found the Production-Ready Serverless workshop very informative and practical. In other AWS courses, you only learn about the products. But in this workshop, you learn how to use them in the real-world. Yan gave me the building blocks that I can use in my own projects!

Martijn van der Kamp

Independent DevOps Specialist

What you will build

You will build an e-commerce website that lets you browse and order food from fictional restaurants from popular TV shows. Along the way, you’ll learn how to build a production-ready serverless application by getting your hands dirty and building something from scratch.

Production-Ready Serverless covers everything serious practitioners should know.You could spend tens of thousands on costly mistakes, and years of dev time to learn these lessons, or you could spend a few days downloading Yan's extensive experience. The choice is clear!

Shawn Wang

Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, Author of "The Coding Career Handbook"

Available formats

Next workshops

Self-paced workshop, starting September 1st

The class takes place over 4 weeks, with an average commitment of 4 to 5 hours per week.

Each week will follow this schedule:

Monday: Lectures and learning exercise released via video link shared on our Discord server, and via email. You’ll be sent a link to the pre-recorded lectures within the Senzo platform.
All week: Peer chat and exercise sharing via Discord server with the instructor and your class group.
Following Monday 11am and again at 11pm CET: Live Q&A sessions (~1 hour) with the instructor to recap the week. The link will be shared on Discord & via email; this will be a private stream.

All materials will be permanently available on the Senzo platform.

SPECIAL OFFER: get 15% OFF with the promo code “yanprs15” during checkout.

If you want to learn Serverless and AWS, you can not find a better person than Yan. His workshop is full of practical, actionable advice on implementing serverless architectures on AWS. This is one of the best investments you can make for your Serverless journey.

Bala Chalasani

Founder at Cloud Architectures

Yan took us through a proper deep dive into the typical AWS services leveraged in serverless solutions built on AWS. Exceptional pairing when questions arrived, and he took time to discuss our needs and issues, in the context of the different topics covered.

Arne Haagensen

Head of Public Cloud at Capra Consulting

Instructor-led workshop, December 9th-10th

The is a 2-day, instructor-led workshop conducted through Zoom.

Both days would start at 9:00 am CEST and finish at 5:00 pm CEST, with 1-hour lunch break plus regular 15-minute breaks throughout the day.

Day 1

09:00 – Introductions
09:05 – AWS Lambda 101
09:45 – Serverless framework 101
10:15 – Break
10:30 – Building APIs with API Gateway and Lambda
11:00 – Securing APIs with IAM authorization
11:20 – Cognito 101
11:30 – Securing APIs with Cognito User Pools
12:00 – Lunch
13:00 – API Gateway best practices
13:20 – Writing integration tests for Lambda
14:10 – Writing acceptance tests for Lambda
14:30 – Break
14:45 – Setting up CI/CD pipelines
15: 00 – CI/CD security best practice
15:20 – Break
15:35 – Configuration management with SSM Parameter Store
16:00 – How best to secure credentials & API keys
16:30 – Day 1 wrap up + open questions

Day 2

09:00 – Project organization
09:20 – Processing events in realtime with Lambda
10:15 – How to choose the right application integration service
10:30 – Break
10:45 – SNS vs SQS vs Kinesis vs EventBridge
11:00 – Error handling for realtime event processing systems
11:15 – Per-function IAM roles
11:40 – Setting up log aggregation for Lambda functions
12:00 – Lunch
13:00 – Structured logging
13:30 – Sample debug logs in production
14:00 – Break
14:10 – Distributed tracing with X-Ray
15:00 – Capture and forward correlation IDs
15:30 – Break
15:50 – Alerts you should have
16:15 – Right-sizing function memories
16:30 – Day 2 wrap up + open questions

There will be no more than 6 hours of actual screen time each day.

All materials (including the recordings of the 2 days) will be permanently available to you afterwards.

SPECIAL OFFER: get 30% OFF with the EARLY BIRD tickets before Nov 1st.

Yan's Production-Ready Serverless workshop covered a wide range of different AWS technologies in just 2 days. He really opened my eyes to new ways of developing with AWS serverless technology and how I can apply them in my day job.

Andrew Maughan

Web Developer at CEF

The journey Yan took to building the big-mouth app was very realistic for a modern web application. We learnt so much in just 2 days and went from zero to having a good understanding of the Serverless landscape.

Quynh Nguyen

Engineering Manager at SimplyBusiness

Need to quickly upskill your team?

You can also book me to run this workshop as in-house training in your company. There are many benefits to this:

Workshop tickets are cheaper per person.
We can be more flexible on the dates. I will do my best to accommodate your schedule.
During the 2 days, we can discuss topics that are specific to your company and project(s).
We can tailor the curriculum of the workshop (within reasons) to make it even more valuable for you.

Sounds interesting? Let’s schedule a call to talk about how we can make this the best training experience for you and your teams.

FAQ

Am I ready for this course? (prerequisites)

I assume you have some basic understanding of AWS, knows how to navigate your way around the AWS console. Experience with Lambda, CloudFormation and other relevant services would be a great help, but those will be covered in the introductory section of this workshop.

Also, the exercises in this workshop will be carried out in Node.js but you don’t need to be an expert. I will give you detailed instructions and provide you with all the code you need to write. But it’ll be helpful if you can understand basic Javascript and knows how to install packages from NPM.

Will I have access to the code for the workshop?

Yes! All the code and lecture materials will be available to you after the workshop, forever. This applies to both instructor-led as well as self-paced workshops.

I will have preferred to use [X] technology.

I picked the technologies used in this workshop based on my experience, how well they work together and their adoption in the wider community to make the workshop relevant to as many of you as possible.

However, most of what you will learn in this workshop is applicable to other tools that you might use as well. For example, if you use different programming language, or deployment framework (SAM, CDK, Terraform, etc.). The important concepts and patterns that you will learn from this workshop are applicable to all of them.

And, if you have questions about how to adapt these ideas to your technology of choice, you can always bring them up during the workshop! I have worked with a wide range of different technologies and might be able to give you advice on how best to apply these ideas to your specific toolchain.

I'm running serverless in production already, is this workshop still relevant for me?

Yes! I have trained many engineers with production experience of serverless technologies and helped raise their game and help them make better architectural decisions when it comes to both AWS and serverless.

In fact, those that get the most from this workshop tend to have some experience with serverless technologies in AWS already. Because they often have specific questions or challenges they are facing, and I can help them address those questions/challenges during the workshop.

How do I convince my manager to let me attend?

Trying to convince your manager to let you attend the workshop? I’ve created a customizable email template that you can use to prove the value of your attendance:

Dear [your manager’s name],

I’d like your permission to attend this serverless workshop by Yan Cui, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and has several years of experience of actually running serverless applications in production with AWS Lambda at scale.

[insert URL of the workshop you want to attend]

The workshop is happening on [insert workshop date]. Attending this workshop will be beneficial to both my personal growth and our company’s cloud knowledge in the following areas:

Boost proficiency in AWS’s serverless offerings, like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito and EventBridge.
Learn about the latest features of AWS Lambda such as Provisioned Concurrency and Lambda Destinations and when to use them.
Get educated on architectural and operational best practices on topics such as CI/CD, security, testing, logging and monitoring.
Gain valuable hands-on experience which I can bring back to my team and apply right away.

The cost for the workshop is [insert ticket price for the workshop you want to attend].

Hope to hear from you soon and many thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

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