Learn AWS Serverless

What is serverless?

The serverless computing model is an approach in cloud computing where the cloud provider provisions compute resources for running a cloud application on a dynamic, as-needed basis. Instead of having virtual machines running all the time, even when not completely necessary, serverless sits almost idle until some configured trigger occurs that tells the cloud provider to dynamically execute code spinning up the necessary resources in the moment they are needed. Then, as soon as that piece of code is run and finished the cloud provider turns off the resources used. This means that charges are only incurred while the resources are being utilized, instead of an always on approach. Typically the snippets of code run are called functions and serverless is sometimes referred to as "Functions as a Service" or "FaaS".

Running serverless with AWS

AWS offers a few different services that help you build and run serverless applications. You'll need a few different services to have a complete serverless infrastructure. This list will help you get started with the various services that AWS offers to run a serverless application and our content listed below will dive deeper into more specifics about these services.

Compute: AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate

Storage: Amazon S3, Amazon EFS

Data stores: Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora Serverless, Amazon RDS Proxy

API Proxy: Amazon API Gateway

Application integration: Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, Amazon EventBridge

Analytics: Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena