Let's look at the development environment and the tools that we will need to create and run the serverless applications that we will create in later chapters. We will be using Visual Studio Code for code editing, Node.js and JavaScript for writing our serverless applications, and we will use tools such as Postman to test our serverless applications. Let's start by looking at what Visual Studio Code is, the benefits it provides, its installation instructions, and the Visual Studio Code user interface.

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code is a free, open source code editor that runs on all operating systems (macOS, Linux, and Windows). It supports development operations such as task running, debugging, and version control. It provides the tools developers will need for a code, build, and debug cycle, leaving more complex workflows to more fully featured IDEs.

Visual Studio Code is a lightning fast code editor, perfect for day-to-day use. With support for hundreds of languages, it aids productivity with auto-indentation, syntax highlighting, box-selection, bracket-matching, snippets, and more. It features intuitive keyboard shortcuts, easy customization of the editor using user-defined settings, and its community-contributed keyboard shortcut mappings will let you navigate your source code with ease. It also has built-in support for code completion—IntelliSense...

Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. The Node.js package ecosystem, npm (https://www.npmjs.com/), is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world. Node.js is a platform for building fast and scalable server applications using JavaScript. We will be using Node.js when we write serverless applications in later chapters, which we will use to deploy to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node is designed to build scalable network applications. In the following, hello readers example, many connections can be handled concurrently. Upon each connection, the callback is fired, but if there is no work to be done, Node will sleep:

const http = require('http...

Postman makes developing APIs easy and it is the most complete toolset for API development. Postman has been designed with developers in mind and it is packed with lots of options and features:

• It is the most widely used REST client around the world
• It has been designed to support API developers from the ground up
• It has an intuitive user interface to create workflows, add tests, send requests to endpoints, and save the responses for the API calls

Postman's options and features are:

• It stores all the requests made
• It supports variable substitutions
• It has support for creating environments
• It has support for tests & pre-request scripts
• It has support for collections
• It supports request descriptions

Software Development Kits (SDKs) are tools that will help you to write serverless applications on the three cloud providers. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP all provide different SDKs for different languages, so that you can integrate their services into your applications. Let's look at the SDKs that each cloud provider has that we would need to integrate into our serverless applications.

AWS offers SDKs for many different languages, including Node.js. Some of the languages for which it offers SDKs are:

• Node.js
• Java
• .NET
• Go
• C++
• Python
• Ruby
• iOS
• Android
• Browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari etc.,)
• AWS IOT

However, there are many more languages and platforms that could be included in this list...

In this chapter, you learned about setting up a development environment for writing serverless applications by installing Visual Studio Code, and gained an understanding of the Node.js programming language, and installed it. You also learned about Postman and how it can help you to API test serverless applications. You also learned about the different Node.js SDKs that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP provide, which we will be using in later chapters to write our serverless applications.

In the next chapter, we will dig deep into what AWS Lambda is and other serverless offerings from AWS.