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What are Backend Listeners?

Introduction​

Events occur all the time throughout any application, they may for example be a database or file being updated, a timer firing or a message being sent, and sometimes additional processing is required elsewhere in the system as a result of them happening.

These events can be used to trigger AWS Lambda functions to perform the necessary processing.

In order to facilitate the creation of these functions there is a base template project that can be used to scaffold a "listener" Lambda function application. The template uses an extensible internal architecture designed to make implementing processing logic as simple as possible and comes with the following pre-built:

  • CircleCI pipline that just needs amending for your own specific project demands;
  • Basic terraform configuration for development, staging and production environments;
  • Pre-configured setup of AWS Lambda logging and XRay;
  • Fully working example of a Simple Query Service (SQS) message event triggering processing to update DynamoDb;
  • Full unit test coverage of all sample code, including end-to-end tests using BDDfy;