Passing data between Terraform and Serverless with SSM Parameters

Pre-requisites

1. Access to an AWS account.
2. aws-cli is installed and configured (see AWS CLI docs for specific configuration steps).
3. Terraform is installed (see the Terraform website for instructions).
4. Serverless is installed (see the Getting Started guide).

Deploying the infrastructure

1. Deploy the Terraform infrastructure:

cd terraform
terraform init
terraform apply

2. Deploy the Serverless project:

cd ../serverless
serverless deploy
serverless info --verbose | grep ServiceEndpoint | sed s/ServiceEndpoint\:\ //g # Gets Endpoint URL

3. Open <ENDPOINT>?name=<VALUE_TO_ADD> in your browser.

Explanation

The terraform directory defines a small set of infrastructure elements: a VPC, the subnets, a security group, and an RDS MySQL database. The key there is the parameters.tf file that defines the SSM parameters and populates them with the information about the database.

The serverless directory contains a simple Serverless Framework project. The function invoked via an HTTP call takes a name query param. It inserts the param into the DB and renders the whole table. The function assumes that the table called things exists. There is no validation on the name param, so be creative!