Building a 100% Serverless Platform

About BuildCenter

BuildCenter is a bay area startup that is working to revolutionize how contracting companies manage all parts of their operations.

The Challenge

BuildCenter wanted the ability to scale easily as well as not pay for resources that were not being used.

BuildCenter also had a small team and wanted something that would be easy to maintain.

The Solution

Serverless Guru worked with BuildCenter to capture these requirements and turn them into an architecture diagram which leveraged fully managed services on AWS and serverless technologies.

BuildCenter faced issues with Terraform in the past for their IAC (Infrastructure as Code), which led to Serverless Guru pushing to use the Serverless Framework as an alternative.

The change achieved a large reduction in infrastructure size and complexity by allowing Serverless Framework to automatically generate much of the code in the background, meaning once again less time was being devoted to anything other than the product.

The frontend was a SPA (Single page application) written using AngularJS.

The frontend infrastructure consisted of the following, key AWS services:

  • AWS S3 for static hosting
  • AWS Cloudfront for caching
  • AWS ACM for HTTPS
  • AWS Route53 for DNS

Each one of these services, above, was automated via the Serverless Framework and all of it was able to be deployed and connected with a single terminal command.

The backend was written using NodeJS and was broken apart by logical domain boundaries.

The backend infrastructure consisted of the following, key AWS services:

  • AWS Lambda for the business logic
  • Amazon Aurora Serverless for the MySQL database
  • AWS Cognito for adding an authentication layer to the REST API
  • Amazon API Gateway for hosting the REST API
  • AWS SES for sending emails to users

Why Serverless Guru

Serverless Guru brought in a wealth of experience around serverless, cloud development, automation, and application development which allowed BuildCenter to augment their entire backend development and DevOps responsibilities.

The Serverless Guru team had also built out similar projects utilizing the same AWS services that fit the BuildCenter project for Fortune 100+ companies.

Having Serverless Guru develop the backend and automate the deployment of both the backend and frontend has really helped streamline our development cycles.

As we build more applications and get into more automation with things like testing and CI/CD, we are excited by the potential we can achieve with our current team, as well as how easy it would be to grow the team with our current tool set.

- Jason Alcaraz, Project Manager at BuildCenter

Next Step

To learn more about how to work with Serverless Guru, fill our contact form or email our team at projects@serverlessguru.com.

More Case Studies

AWS
Serverless
DevOps

Serverless Best Practices for Twenty Over Ten

Twenty Over Ten is a digital marketing platform for the modern financial advisor. Twenty Over Ten offers a robust set of tools to streamline the website development process including drag-n-drop user interface for building pages, SSL, advanced blogging capabilities, and much more.

Serverless
AWS
Migration

Migrating 3 Billion Requests Per Month To Serverless

This client had a lot they needed to handle, namely, running services that consistently hit three billion requests per month while managing onsite and remote teams throughout North America, Central Europe, and India. Finally, this client had seen the benefits of serverless, yet lacked the in-house experience to execute confidently and according to best practices.

Request a quote

Mail us to contact@serverlessguru.com or call +1 302-656-4409
Serverless Guru, LLC
4023 Kennett Pike #50487
Wilmington, DE 19807
By submitting our form, you are agreeing to receive emails from us which you can opt out of at anytime.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.