Do you have an idea for an app but don't know where to start? In this session, we walk you through the process of taking your idea to reality, and we show you all the infrastructure you need to understand along the way. We also show you how AWS platform services and SDKs can help you get to a quality release faster and then scale for success with serverless technologies. In addition, we demonstrate how you can build a scalable production-ready app quickly with GraphQL and machine language capabilities. Please join us for a speaker meet-and-greet following this session at the Speaker Lounge (ARIA East, Level 1, Willow Lounge). The meet-and-greet starts 15 minutes after the session and runs for half an hour.

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From Idea to Customers:
Developing Modern Cloud-Enabled
Apps with AWS
M O B 2 0 1
Lisa Shon
Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services
Tomas Batalla
Software Engineer
Goodreads

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What is Goodreads?
The world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.
Our mission is to help people find and share books they love.

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Our platforms

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We have a lot of content
• 80 million users
• 2.3 billion books shelved
• 83 million text reviews
• With all this content, how can we help our users’ discover the next
great book for them?

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Product Lifecycle
Idea Design Develop
DeployOperate
TestImprove

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Idea

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Design
• UI
• But also technology
• What platform will you use?
• How are you going to fetch the data?

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Why cross-platform?
• Feature parity across mobile surfaces
(especially if design is “product specific”)
• Cost of development
• Over the air (OTA) updates
• Large open-source community support

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Why not cross-platform?
• Need to learn JavaScript
• Another surface to maintain
• Nascent technology

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Getting the data

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Solving our data fetching problem
• Does it solve the problem?
• Scale
• Domain Development
• Consistency
• Bonus: Fun

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But it’s a service
We don’t want to run ops

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Design

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Develop
• Scope
• Unit tests
• Test Driven Development (TDD) — Red,
Green, Refactor
• Use environments
• Code review

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Deployments
• Test
• Preprod environments
• Production

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App testing
• QA testing — Manual and Automated
• Beta/internal release

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Deploy
Release the app to our users

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Operational Metrics
• Crashes
• Latency
• Client errors and server errors
• Transactions per second (TPS)

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Business metrics
• Shelvings
• Users
• Page views

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Improve
• How are customers responding?
• What do the metrics say?

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Building on the feature

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Back to Design
Idea Design Develop
DeployOperate
TestImprove

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What problem am I solving?

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What does my app look like?

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What does my app look like?

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Which platforms to support?

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Platforms

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What is the MVP for my app?

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What is the MVP for my app?
• Given a sentence
• And a language
• Return the translation in that language

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Interacting with services

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Domain objects

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GraphQL
• Strong typing
• Queries, mutations, subscriptions
• Client-specified shape of response
• Efficient
• Extensible

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AWS AppSync
http://
query/mutation
subscription

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AWS AppSync
Serverless Any
data source
Real-time data
GraphQL
facade
Conflict resolution
Enterprise security
Cross-platformOffline data
http://

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Resources in the Cloud

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Test
• Local testing in simulators and emulators
• Functional testing
• User experience testing
• Real-device testing
• Different form factors

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Real-device testing
Test Android, iOS, and web apps on real devices in the cloud

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Backend

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Backend
production
development

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Backend
production
development
continuous deployment

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How does my app perform?

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Monitor resources and applications

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How is my app used?

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How is my app used?
• Number of users
• Unfulfilled requests
• Most popular breed
• Time in app

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How is my app used?
Engage users via email, push, SMS & analytics

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Evaluate needs
• Improve retention
• Improve acquisition
• Improve stability

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Idea Design Develop
DeployOperate
TestImprove

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Resources
Sample app on Github:
https://github.com/dabit3/appsync-lambda-ai
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com
https://www.goodreads.com/jobs (we’re hiring!)

71. Thank you!
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Lisa Shon
Tomas Batalla

72. Time: 15 minutes after this session
Location: Speaker Lounge (ARIA East, Level 1, Willow Lounge)
Duration: 30 min.

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