GorillaStack’s serverless HipChat Connect boilerplate

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Have you ever wanted to try out a full serverless architecture? Or write a HipChat plugin? The new open source boilerplate from GorillaStack, announced at this year’s AtlasCamp, enables developers to easily deploy the back-ends for their plugins to Amazon Web Services’ serverless products in Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and S3.

The HipChat team, together with Amazon Web Services, engaged GorillaStack to develop an open-source boilerplate repository to help their plugin developers. GorillaStack is a SaaS solution that automates optimizations in the AWS cloud and is a go-to tool for DevOps engineers who want to ease the heavy lifting of cloud cost management. GorillaStack has displayed its commitment to open-source contributions in the past with a particular focus on serverless solutions so were the obvious partner for this contribution.

There are four key benefits to a serverless deployment:

Firstly, you pay for what you use. With AWS Lambda, you pay per invocation and for the amount of time your code runs and amount of memory required. No more paying for idle time.

Secondly, it’s easy to jump in and get going. There’s no need to spend time building environments or building CI-CD pipelines for blue-green deployments. Just get your code running and the rest will take care of itself.

Thirdly, you can iterate faster. It’s super easy to deploy different stages and versions: dev, staging, beta, prod, v1, v2. Cutting down on deployment time gives your more time to focus on the development work that truly matters.

And fourthly, it has scale built-in. There’s no need to worry about performance testing or worrying about whether your infrastructure will be able to handle high volumes.

If you want to try out a fully serverless architecture or just write a HipChat plugin, head to the GorillaStack repository on bitbucket and let us know what you think!