The underlying AWS mobile CLI used in this course has changed it's API. If you're starting to learn AWS, you may want to try the latest course. We now recommend you take the AWS for Front-End Engineers (ft. S3, Cloudfront & Route 53) course.

Check out a free preview of the full Rapid Development on AWS: React, Node.js & GraphQL course:
The "Introduction" Lesson is part of the full, Rapid Development on AWS: React, Node.js & GraphQL course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

After introduces himself and the "Deploying Full Stack: Node.js & React on AWS" course, Steve talks about why prototyping and deploying on world-class architecture is important.

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Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson

[00:00:02]
>> Steve Kinney: Hello, my name is Steve, and I work at a company called SendGrid. Our major cash cow is providing an API that sends a billion emails a day. I do not work on that API. [LAUGH] I work on a WYSIWYG editor for making emails that's built in React, and build on top of that.

[00:00:26] We're gonna talk a little bit today about building applications using React and using Node, with a little special twist. We talk about them in terms of building them on some infrastructure that can support not only your first user, but your first 10,000 users or your first 10 million users.

[00:00:45] We're gonna talk about building React and Node applications quickly on a powerful infrastructure, right? We're gonna look at Amazon Web Services and see that we can actually use a lot of these tools to build our applications and deploy them with relatively little effort compared to what we might think.

[00:01:07] Me, personally, when I'm building an application, it all starts out with hopes and dreams. It starts out with, I have this great idea for an app, you design it, you start thinking about filling up a swimming pool full of money after it goes viral, and it's gonna be really great.

[00:01:21] And then you have to start worrying about things like deployment. Or you have the fact that it's starting to timeout because you are so popular, and all of a sudden you're getting crushed with all of your new friends that want to use your application. Because doing this stuff, and doing this stuff at scale, is difficult, right?

[00:01:40] And one of the things that Amazon learned is they can figure that out and then they can rent it out to us to use it so we don't have to. We can do a lot of the parts that make our applications really special, right? There are exceptions, but usually, just having off does not make people love your application, right?

[00:01:59] Definitely being able to reach it if it does get very popular is incredibly important, but there's a whole bunch of non-glamorous parts that don't make our apps special. And what we can do is leverage these services to focus on what makes our products and our applications unique and to kind of outsource all of the rest.

[00:02:18] So this is a course on building React applications with Node backends on AWS. And we're gonna take a look at a bunch of very, very new tools on the AWS platform that we'll talk about in a little bit.