Less management, more serverless development with Begin functions
--
This is Part Two of our 2 part series on using Begin.
Part One: Introduction to Begin: Create, build, & deploy applications at scale
Begin is a platform that will speed up your development of serverless cloud applications. With serverless technology, you don’t have to worry about server maintenance or running into scalability issues. From start to finish, Begin provides you with all the required tools and takes away the hassle of deployment and infrastructure management so that the prime focus is on making the product. Backed by AWS tech, the applications are powered by a runtime library called Architect, which further simplifies your development process.
In this article, we’ll explore some concepts around the types of Begin functions, how to work with Begin data, and also run some basic tests. During the course of the article, we’ll deploy a simple application that will illustrate these concepts.
You will require a GitHub account to use Begin. All projects developed with the platform are managed at GitHub.
Base concepts:
Begin functions:
The applications you build on Begin with the Architect framework will allow you to create three types of functions.
- HTTP functions: As the name suggests, these functions are synchronous in nature that handle incoming HTTP requests.
- Event functions: Think of these functions when you need to handle asynchronous tasks. Event based functions follow the pub/sub (publish-subscribe) model to handle less time sensitive requests.
- Scheduled Functions: As their name says, these functions are used when a job needs to be performed at regular intervals. They are the serverless equivalent of a cron job.
Begin data:
An easy to use scalable, SSD based, document database that is built on top of AWS DynamoDB. By default, it’s accessible to every app made using Begin. Its core API has three simple methods: get, set, destroy, and three helper methods: incr, decr, count.
Begin data documents have two properties: table — a required field, which groups document, key -a property that indexes documents (if not supplied, a pseudo-random unique key will be generated).
