Serverless Web Design for NBA Lineup Performance using AWS

Introduction

Website can be found here here

I was studying AWS for the solutions architect certification recently and wanted to implement the skills I had been learning. Previously, I had made a Python script which pulled five man lineup data, with filtering for player inclusion, exclusion, and minimum minutes played. However, it's quite clunky to run and inaccessible to people without a myriad of technical skills. Since I already had most of the backend code figured out, it seemed like a straightforward and simple project to build out a web version of this script, that could be used by any non-technical user.

App Architecture

Before I begin talking about my process and people realize I'm completely fraudulent, my disclaimer is that I've never built a fully functional website before. Sorry if I violated a bunch of industry standards and failed to create a design/diagram before building. I've always preferred to make mistakes and learn anyways :P.

When I was watching videos on AWS Lambda, I recognized instantly how useful this would be for small apps, especially in microservice designs. For my application, once a user had the parameters for the lineup request they wanted, the return for the results could be accomplished with AWS Lambda. That was the core function of my site, and I already had most of the code. From there, I started to work backwards. I needed a function to generate all of the players on the team, and also one to get all the teams in the league (preparing for the expansion.)

I went to work building my Lambda function for getting NBA lineups, which used the `nba_api` Python package. However, NBA.com, annoyingly, actually blocks API requests from AWS. There was the option of making the requests using a proxy server, but I didn't feel like paying for one. My solution was to pull all 5 man lineups from NBA.com myself, and have it in an Amazon S3 bucket. Then my Lambda function would essentially query from the lineups stored in my S3 bucket. So I wrote some code that would collect the 5 man lineup data using `nba_api`, and then upload it to Amazon S3 from my PC. Another challenge arose from this: I was working on this during the regular season, and needed to continually update the 5 man lineup data. Honestly at this point I was too bothered to formulate a way to automate this process daily -- I didn't want to keep my laptop on everyday for an automated process to run. So I just manually updated things by running my Amazon S3 upload script whenever I remembered too. I know this isn't the most elegant solution, but it's free and it still works.

For frontend, I've had good experiences using Github Pages (which this blog is on obviously) so I just stuck with what I was familiar with. All in all, the app is designed as such:

Frontend:

• Github Pages
• Runs on some combination of HTML and JS

Backend:

• Amazon S3 - to store 5 man lineup data
• get_nba_lineups - Lambda function which queries my S3 data to give lineup performance results
• get_team_players - Lambda function which makes API call to pbpstats.com for all players on a team in the 2024-25 season.
• get_nba_teams - Lambda function which makes API call to balldontlie.io to get all the teams in the NBA.

Vibe Building

Conclusion

Github repository and script can be found here