Planetary-View

Hello, I am Akashay Anand. an undergrad based in INDIA // The Tools used in this project is quite new for me. it brings me exposure tools like AWS(lambda, s3, etc.), serverless framework.
// I am documenting my work here in README.md file.
//For any query you can contact me at akashayanand1@gmail.com

SERVERLESS PROJECT 🥷

Tech Stacks: NodeJS(axios, twilio) ,Serverless framework, AWS(Lambda, IAM, etc.), NASA API

📺📸 Video of me explaining the entire project. 👇🏻👇🏻

Let's First understand What is serverless⁉️

Cloud computing model that enables developers to build and run application code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. We pay for the computing time we consumed.

Many cloud providers provide services to implement this paradigm. such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

Why I used aws instead of other cloud providers?!

as I have AWS free tier account. I have used it in some of my other projects. I am familiar with the AWS interface and its terminology. thats why I am going with it.
second reason is: the aws lambda can uphold 1 million requests and 3.2 million compute seconds per month in the free tier.

Overview 🤖

Created a serverless project with NodeJS runtime which fetches the apod image and metadata regarding the same from NASA API. Then format that data and transfer it to my phone number using the Twilio library.
To automate this process I deployed it on AWS Lambda service which runs our function on certain events(for this it is 25 minute time period).

Initialization 🧑🏻‍💻

• create a project folder
  • initialize serverless in it ( guide: https://www.serverless.com/framework/docs/getting-started )
• initialize npm init
• install modules ( Axios, Twilio )

[Note]: after initializing serverless; this two file should be appeared(serverless.yml & index.js) we will be working on this only

Serverless.yml

open serverless.yml file. YAML files are generally used for configuration. you can say it is the advanced version of XML and JSON. For YAML you can prefer my documentation here: https://github.com/Akashay-Anand/Learn-YAML
///

lets start with yaml code

• this templet may contain most of the things except event & environment

Environment

# We can directly add it as jey value paire
    environment:
     API_KEY: "<Your API KEY here>"
     Twilio_Account_SID: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
     Twilio_Auth_Token: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
     Twilio_Phone_Number: +12200000000
     Personal_Nomber: +919000000000

///

EVENT
It defines when will a function gets invoked, its frequency...

# for this two keywords are used rate & cron

# rate example
    events:
     - schedule:
         rate: rate(10 minutes)

# cron example
   events:
     - schedule: cron(0 20 * * 1) # Every Monday at 8:00 PM

# cron syntax breakdown
* * * * *
- - - - -
| | | | |
| | | | +----- Day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday, 7 is also Sunday on some systems)
| | | +------- Month (1 - 12)
| | +--------- Day of the month (1 - 31)
| +----------- Hour (0 - 23)
+------------- Minute (0 - 59)

Index.js

Let's understand the code here 🧑🏻‍💻🥷

// import required modules
const axios = require('axios');
const twilio = require('twilio');

// create handler function // note name should be same as you of YAML file
module.exports.handler = async (event) => { }
//Now the rest code will be inside the handler function

// first understand what is async and await
//In old age, JS is single-threaded, which means it executes one line of code at a time. (synchronous) (not prefered )(delay increased)
// With modern ECMAScript updates javascript started performing asynchronously means it doesn't wait for a code to get executed.
// So if it is taking time its starts executing the next one parallelly.

// and to balance this feature we use async/await. 
// JavaScript is non-blocking code > that doesn't wait for code to get executed and started executing the next line of code... may cause errors and delay

// Axios -> HTTP request -> returns promise -> of response object -> contains data, headers, status, config, etc.
const fetchdata = await axios.get(url);
// extracting specific properties from the response object
const getdata = fetchdata.data;

// then created a message body and initiated for sending sms with Twilio

After that I deployed this project

Need to be logged in with AWS in terminal
[Note] IAM user should have all proper policies attached to it, otherwise, you will get lots of errors. 😑
To deploy use the command 'sls deploy'

Finally function is deployed on lambda we can monitor it there... 👩🏻‍🚀👩🏻‍🚀🌐

End || good-day