Introducing “Discuss” — A serverless forum software

Forums are one of the best ways to discuss specific topics and share knowledge. Everyone knows the big players such as vBulletin, phpBB or Discourse.

You can easily download the forum software, spin up a server, upload and install it there and start discussing.

But we are serverless developers, right? Why don’t we implement our own forum software which is based on the serverless architecture and scale infinitely without going bankrupt?

What’s “Discuss”

I want to share with you a new Open Source project which does just that. It’s called “Discuss” and it’s a mixture of traditional forum softwares and concepts taken from websites such as Reddit, Digg or HackerNews.

Live demo

Where can I find the source code?

Here’s the link to the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/justserverless/discuss

What technologies were used?

The application was written with the help of Node.js, ES2015, DynamoDB, GraphQL, React and Redux. You may read along the commits to see the step-by-step process the application was developed.

What’s the underlying architecture

This project is heavily influenced by the Serverless GraphQL blog and the Serverless GraphQL boilerplate.

The application exposes one single endpoint you can send your GraphQL queries against via POST. Just one Lambda function is used to handle the logic. You may want to read here why this architecture is absolutely awesome.

Join the fun!

You’re greatly invited to contribute! Just open up issues or PRs so that we can enhance this software and make it better!