This workshop is no longer actively being maintained and is not recommended for use. Please visit our Wild Rydes Serverless Workshops for the latest hands-on examples of building serverless applications. This workshop is preserved here for interested community members to fork and update as separate project.

Zombie Microservices Workshop: Lab Guide

Overview of Workshop Labs

The Zombie Microservices Workshop introduces the basics of building serverless applications using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Cognito, Amazon SNS, and other AWS services. In this workshop, as a new member of the AWS Lambda Signal Corps, you are tasked with completing the development of a serverless survivor communications system during the Zombie Apocalypse.

This workshop has a baseline survivor chat app that is launched via CloudFormation. Complete the lab exercises to extend the functionality of the communications system or add your own custom functionality!

Prior to beginning the labs, you will need to finalize the setup of User authentication for the application with Cognito User Pools. This is a necessary step to finalize the readiness of the application.

Required: Setup Authentication with Cognito User Pools

In this setup lab, you will integrate user authentication into your serverless survivor chat application using Amazon Cognito User Pools.

Labs

Each of the labs in this workshop is an independent section and you may choose to do some or all of them, or in any order that you prefer.

• Lab 1: Typing Indicator

  This exercise already has the UI and backend implemented, and focuses on how to setup the API Gateway to provide a RESTful endpoint. You will configure the survivor chat application to display which survivors are currently typing in the chat room.

• Lab 2: SMS Integration with Twilio

  This exercise uses Twilio to integrate SMS text functionality with the survivor chat application. You will configure a free-trial Twilio phone number so that users can send text messages to the survivor chat application. You'll learn to leverage mapping templates in API Gateway to perform data transformations in an API.

• Lab 3: Search Integration with Elasticsearch

  This exercise adds an Elasticsearch cluster to the application which is used to index chat messages streamed from the DynamoDB table containing chat messages.

• Lab 4: Slack Integration

  This exercise integrates the popular messaging app, Slack, into the chat application so that survivors can send messages to the survivor chat from within the Slack app.

• Lab 5: Intel Edison Zombie Motion Sensor (IoT device required)

  This exercise integrates motion sensor detection of zombies to the chat system using an Intel Edison board and a Grove PIR Motion Sensor. You will configure a Lambda function to consume motion detection events and push them into the survivor chat!

Workshop Cleanup

This section provides instructions to tear down your environment when you're done working on the labs.

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Let's Begin! Launch the CloudFormation Stack

Prior to launching a stack, be aware that a few of the resources launched need to be manually deleted when the workshop is over. When finished working, please review the "Workshop Cleanup" section to learn what manual teardown is required by you.

1. To begin this workshop, click one of the 'Deploy to AWS' buttons below for the region you'd like to use. This is the AWS region where you will launch resources for the duration of this workshop. This will open the CloudFormation template in the AWS Management Console for the region you select.

Region	Launch Template
N. Virginia (us-east-1)
Ohio (us-east-2)
Oregon (us-west-2)
Ireland (eu-west-1)
Frankfurt (eu-central-1)
Tokyo (ap-northeast-1)
Seoul (ap-northeast-2)
Singapore (ap-southeast-1)

If you have CloudFormation launch FAILED issues, please try launching in us-east-1 (Virginia)

2. Once you have chosen a region and are inside the AWS CloudFormation Console, you should be on a screen titled "Select Template". We are providing CloudFormation with a template on your behalf, so click the blue Next button to proceed.

3. On the following screen, "Specify Details", your Stack is pre-populated with the name "zombiestack". You can customize that to a name of your choice less than 15 characters in length or leave as is. For the parameters section, if you want to develop with a team and would like to create IAM Users in your account to grant your teammates access, then specify how many teammates/users you want to be created in the NumberOfTeammates text box. Otherwise, leave it defaulted to 0 and no additional users will be created. The user launching the stack (you) already have the necessary permissions. Click Next.

If you create IAM users, an IAM group will also be created and those users will be added to that group. On deletion of the stack, those resources will be deleted for you.

4. On the "Options" page, leave the defaults and click Next.

5. On the "Review" page, verify your selections, then scroll to the bottom and select the checkbox I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources. Then click Create to launch your stack.

6. Your stack will take about 3 minutes to launch and you can track its progress in the "Events" tab. When it is done creating, the status will change to "CREATE_COMPLETE".

7. Click the "Outputs" tab in CloudFormation and click the link for "MyChatRoomURL". This should open your chat application in a new tab. Leave this tab open as you'll come back to it later.

Please continue to the next section for the required Cognito User Pools authentication setup.

Setup Authentication with Cognito User Pools (Required)

The survivor chat uses Amazon Cognito for authentication. Cognito Federated Identity enables you to authenticate users through an external identity provider and provides temporary security credentials to access your app’s backend resources in AWS or any service behind Amazon API Gateway. Amazon Cognito works with external identity providers that support SAML or OpenID Connect, social identity providers (such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon) and you can also integrate your own identity provider.

In addition to federating 3rd party providers such as Facebook, Google, and other providers, Cognito also offers a new built-in Identity Provider called Cognito User Pools.

A Cognito Federated Identity pool has already been created for you when you launched CloudFormation.

You will now setup the Cognito User Pool as the user directory of your chat app survivors and configure it as a valid Authentication Provider with the Cognito Federated Identity Pool. API Gateway has been configured with IAM Authorization to only allow requests that are signed with valid AWS permissions. When a user signs into the Survivor Chat App (User Pool) successfully, a web call is made to the Cognito Federated Identity Pool to assume temporary AWS credentials for your authenticated user. These credentials are used to make signed AWS SigV4 HTTPS requests to your message API.

Let's get started...

1. Navigate to the Cognito service console.

Cognito User Pools is not available in all AWS regions. Please review the list here for the regions that Cognito is available in. Therefore if you launched your CloudFormation stack in any region other than one of those listed on the above website, then please use the top navigation bar in the management console to switch AWS regions and navigate to us-east-1 (Virginia) to configure Cognito. Your application will stay hosted in the region you launched the CloudFormation template, but the authentication with Cognito will reside in us-east-1 (Virginia). If you launched the Cloudformation stack in one of those regions where Cognito exists, then please simply navigate to the Cognito service in the AWS Management Console as the service is available in that region already and you will configure it within that region.

When inside the Cognito service console, click the blue button Manage your User Pools. You will setup the user directory that your chat application users will a