Serverless Sentiment Sites

TLDR;

Using Lambda, Comprehend, Dynamo, and S3 we can build an end-to-end news aggregator, sentiment analysis and statically generated website.

A proof of concept site shown below:

ignore the almost dead phone

Dev Stack Rational

Major benefits of a serverless architecture:

• Scaleable
• Fully Managed
• Low Cost

Fetching data, analyzing the text and then passing the data to a UI can be achieved in many ways.

More traditionally, a server would be running. Then at a certain interval, it would fetch data from the data source of interest. The would then access a third party sentiment API or run a sentiment algorithm locally. Lastly, the server would save the data to a directory that is available to the web server that is also running on the machine.

There are many problems that can arise here. Here are a few

• Web traffic affects all processes utility
• Sentiment analysis needs to be manually handled
• Cost of running sever while not updating
• The machine is prone to bugs — need patches

The backend