Learning a new technology is fun. The cursing, the reading, the questioning why nothing ever works and why article writers have it in for you. Fun fun. Oh, and sometimes certain things work and you actually gain a bit of skill.

The promise of serverless is lightweight scripts doing neat things without having to manage servers. The implementation does meet some of those criteria, but it comes with some quirks too. In this case, I wanted to start with something easy -- or so I would have thought -- echoing back your IP address. It's actually a simple thing, and on a webserver it is really easy, but not so with serverless. First, AWS has a few layers of stuff, like load balancers and caches, so your not really talking to the end user directly. But you can turn on something called "proxy integration", which makes it seem like the request is hitting your lambda, so woo hoo. The other stumbling block is actually running your code -- as there is no easy way to understand what is going on, and since your code is run somewhere you don't know, it makes debugging a lot more complex. (EDIT: I found out there is a way to see output through CloudWatch, but it isn't easy to see or find, which makes things more difficult than it needs to be).

It's easy to make a typo or lose sense of where you are, and make silly mistakes. A second little project is to aggregate some info from a variety of sources. I'm going to ship it by HTTP GET requests and store it by S3. Just this bit was an adventure, and more than it should hace been. Next I'll have to figure out how to read and gather, and then how to trigger this. More learning, more issues I'm sure.