(3 items)
Building apps on serverless architecture has been a game-changer for me and for developers everywhere, enabling small dev teams to cheaply build and scale services from MVP through to enterprise deployment.
Taking advantage of serverless solutions - such as AWS’ Lambda, Google’s Cloud Functions, and Cloudflare’s Workers - means less resource is spent on traditional dev-ops and deployment and, especially when combined with tools like Serverless framework and its rich ecosystem of plugins, you can use the time instead to better develop your products. Let the provider worry about deploying your code, keeping your services highly available, and scaling them to meet the needs of huge audiences.
The Heroku Dev Center is a repository of guides and articles to provide support for those writing applications to be run on the Heroku platform.
I recently contributed an article for carrying out Direct to S3 File Uploads in Python, as I have previously used a very similar approach to interface with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service in one of my apps running on Heroku.
The approach discussed in the article focuses on avoiding as much server-side processing as possible, with the aim of preventing the app’s web dynos from becoming too tied up and unable to respond to further requests. This is done by using client-side JavaScript to asynchronously carry out the upload directly to S3 from the web browser. The only necessary server-side processing involves the generation of a temporarily-signed (using existing AWS credentials) request, which is returned to the browser in order to allow the JavaScript to successfully make the final PUT request.
I wanted a way in which users can seamlessly upload images for use in the Heroku application discussed in previous posts.
Ideally, the image would be uploaded through AJAX as part of a data-entry form, but without having to refresh the page or anything else that would disrupt the user’s experience. As far as I know, barebones JQuery does not support AJAX uploads, but this handy plugin does.
styled the file input nicely (in a similar way to this guy) and added the JS so that the upload is sent properly (and to the appropriate URL) when a change is detected to the input (i.e. the user does not need to click the ‘upload’ button to start the upload).