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GraphQL APIs With AWS AppSync Part Two

The document summarizes setting up a GraphQL API using AWS AppSync, Lambda, and DynamoDB. It describes creating an IAM user, AWS resources using the Serverless Framework, and a simple GraphQL schema and resolver function to retrieve stock data from Alpha Vantage. It also provides instructions for deploying the API to AWS and testing the deployment with a GraphQL query.

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Jknoxvil
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182 views

GraphQL APIs With AWS AppSync Part Two

The document summarizes setting up a GraphQL API using AWS AppSync, Lambda, and DynamoDB. It describes creating an IAM user, AWS resources using the Serverless Framework, and a simple GraphQL schema and resolver function to retrieve stock data from Alpha Vantage. It also provides instructions for deploying the API to AWS and testing the deployment with a GraphQL query.

Uploaded by

Jknoxvil
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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GraphQL APIs with AWS AppSync: Part two

medium.com/@cbartling/graphql-apis-with-aws-appsync-part-two-c7bc432f3cc6

March 27,
2019

Introduction
This is the second of a series of posts describing my experimentation with AWS AppSync,
Lambda, and DynamoDB. A public GitHub repository exists with this experiment so
others can learn from my efforts. For this post, I will be describing the code that resides
on the v1 tag, so feel free to checkout to this point in time: git checkout v1

Links to the other posts in this series are listed below:

The initial implementation


The implementation of the first version of the technical analysis investment engine will
include the following:

GraphQL schema
AWS AppSync API
AWS Lambda resolver (implemented in Python 3.7)
Various AWS resources to map the AppSync GraphQL API to the Lambda resolver

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Unit and integration tests for the Python handler and supporting code (the testing
will be thoroughly described in the third post of this series)

Alpha Vantage integration


I will be using the Alpha Vantage APIs for investment data and analytics. A free API key
can be obtained from Alpha Vantage by filling out this form. Copy the generated API key
and paste it into a text file named .alphavantage in the root directory of this project. I
have added an entry to the .gitignore file to exclude this hidden file from being version
controlled.

Create a AWS named profile


I will be using AWS IAM to create an IAM user resource that has the AdministratorAccess
Permission Policy. This will be the user that I use to provision all of the AWS resources for
this experiment. AWS IAM best practices advises that you do not use your AWS account
root user credentials to access AWS.

Instead, create an individual IAM user with administrative permissions for the work you
will be performing on AWS. The AWS CLI allows you to maintain a named profile for each
IAM user. The named profiles usage assumes you have AWS CLI installed and configured.
Go here to install and configure the AWS CLI. Once you have configured and signed in to
AWS, perform the following tasks:

1. From the AWS Management Console, create an InvestGuruAdmin IAM user with
the AdministratorAccess Permission Policy. Copy the Access Key ID and Secret Access
Key for the next step.
2. Create the InvestGuruAdmin named profile in your AWS credentials file
( ~/.aws/credentials ) with the associated Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.

Creating the AWS resources


I used the Serverless Framework to scaffold out the initial AWS Lambda project. The
Serverless Framework can do a lot more than just help facilitate the configuration and
deployment of Lambda functions. One can include CloudFormation configuration that
the Serverless Framework will use to create the associated AWS resources.

The Serverless Framework’s configuration file


The centerpiece of a Serverless Framework-managed application is the serverless.yml
file. Its declarations specify everything about the project: cloud provider, plugins, runtime
and deployment configuration to name just a few. A full listing of the options available
through the aws provider within the serverless.yml file can be found here. The user
guide for the aws provider can be found here.

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Using CloudFormation YAML
AWS CloudFormation supports both JSON and YAML formats. I chose YAML as it works
well with the Serverless Framework’s own serverless.yml YAML-based configuration file.

CloudFormation intrinsic functions


You will see a fair amount of intrinsic functions usage (e.g. Fn::GetAtt: , !GetAtt ) in my
CloudFormation YAML. A full description of these functions can be found here. A little
odd to work with at first, but once you get the hang of them, they aren’t too bad. I use
the short form syntax in my serverless.yml file.

Serverless variables
I also use some Serverless Framework variables in the serverless.yml file. A full
description of those can be found here. Again, super helpful for making the
configuration modular. I especially like having the GraphQL schema in its own file
( schema.graphql ) and being able to edit it with syntax highlighting.

serverless.yml
The first forty-four lines of the serverless.yml file contain standard Serverless
Framework YAML configuration, which is annotated below. Everything from line 48 on is
AWS-specific CloudFormation YAML.

The GraphQL schema


I won’t belabor GraphQL here and why the schema is important. If you’re checking out
this blog posting, you probably know what GraphQL is. If not, go here!

Our fledgling schema starts with a couple of custom types and a single query:

AWS Lambda handler


Our SimpleMovingAverageAnalytic AppSync resolver is an AWS Lambda function,
implemented as a simple Python function:

Not much to look at, as most of the heavy lifting is delegated to the
simple_moving_average function. We make two calls to this simple_moving_average
function, retrieving the 50-day and 300-day simple moving averages for a stock. Finally a
result dictionary is built and returned to the event source (in this case, AWS AppSync). A
couple of things to note in this result dictionary:

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1. The structure of the dictionary matches the hierarchical/graph structure from the
GraphQL Schema. The SimpleMovingAverageAnalytic type contains a single
Company type and two lists, keyed by averages50 and averages300 . Each
element in the lists is of type MovingAverageObservation .
2. Do not try to use standard Python snake_case with these keys in the result. The
keys should remain in camelCase to match what GraphQL is going to map to.
AppSync will puke if you don’t exactly match the keys specified in the GraphQL
Schema.

simple_moving_average Python function


This function is pretty self-explanatory. Using the excellent Requests Python package, I
will make a HTTP invocation on the Alpha Vantage SMA API for a company stock. Once
we have the results, I transform the results into a format more suitable for our
application.

Deploying the experiment to AWS


The package.json file contains deployment and undeployment scripts. To deploy the
experiment, use yarn deploy-dev . That will deploy the experiment to the dev stage.
You should see serverless deploy the experiment into AWS. At the end of the process,
some key AWS configuration will be displayed. The AppSync URL and the API key for
authenticating GraphQL requests will be displayed. Take note of these values, as you will
need them for testing the deployment.

When completed with the experiment, use yarn undeploy-dev to remove the experiment
from the dev stage and from AWS.

Testing the experiment deployed to AWS


All of this effort would be wasted if we couldn’t execute our GraphQL query and see real
results come back. Alas, we can use GraphQL Playground to do just that. Below is the
GraphQL query and HTTP headers that you can use to exercise the GraphQL API
currently deployed into AWS. The API key from the deployment step is used in the HTTP
headers as the x-api-key custom AWS header.

HTTP headers

Use the AppSync URL from the deployment step as the endpoint. The screenshot below
demonstrates our simpleMovingAverageAnalytic GraphQL query.

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Next steps
I’ll stop here so you have a chance to ingest this first iteration of our AppSync-hosted
GraphQL API. The next post will cover using pytest to drive our test-driven development
cadence.

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