One Front-End Application with Angular 15.0
- No Database
- Some (bad) scss stylining + Angular Material elements
- Heroku as deployment environment with NodeJS 16.17
Is it really Serverless? More or less…
When we talk about serverless we expect a Cloud infrastructure that delivers data through services (Functions as a Service “FaaS” or Compute as a Service “CaaS”).
In this project the concept of Serverless is really reduced to the bone.
In this scenario, some public exposed third-party APIs are invoked to obtain information and display it on screen in a user-friendly format.
No special infrastructure, no big cloud services.
In particular, APIs are:
retrieving live updated World Wide Covid19 data for each Country:
- https://disease.sh/v2/countries?allowNull=true
retrieving live news from Google Search feed:
- https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=coronavirus&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
I mean, you can just navigate these links via browser…
I took advantage of the opportunity to create a simple web application using existing data and services. They were already out there. I just took that data and incorporated it into the frontend. So yes, we are not talking about a proper Serverless architecture, but the underlying concept remains valid.
During development, therefore, I didn’t even need a database as I have no data to save, only to read.
For the deployment instead I relied on Heroku which, with a few euros per month and with an embarrassing ease of configuration, allowed me to release my application. Furthermore, an automatic continuous integration system is active via GitHub. This means that every time I make changes to the code and push them to my branch, Heroku notices these changes and in a few minutes takes care of receiving the changes, building the application and releasing it on the server.
Et voila! After a few steps my application is online!
It’s not so pretty, but it works 🙂