Planning the application
The application we will build is a very simple cloud notification service. In a nutshell, our function will listen for messages, then forward those messages to email addresses and phone numbers registered in the system. While our system will be somewhat contrived and certainly very simple, hopefully the more practical use cases are clear:
- Our system reminds students and/or parents about upcoming events
- Parents are notified when children enter or leave certain geographic boundaries
- Systems administrators are notified of certain events as they occur
The possibilities are quite vast. For our purposes here, we'll develop not only the cloud-based system, but also a simple desktop application to simulate these types of scenarios. We'll start where the fun is: in the cloud.