What is serverless development?

The following topics will guide you through developing a better conceptual understanding of serverless application development, and how various AWS services fit into together to create application patterns that form the core of your cloud applications. These applications can range from microservices that handle discreet business logic as a part of your application backend, to event-driven workflows that perform data transformations or processing.

Understanding serverless development will you help you make critical decisions about which AWS services are best suited for your business need. For example, choosing between Amazon DocumentDB, DynamoDB, and Aurora PostgreSQL for a database depends on various factors, such as what type of data-structure you want to use, or how many concurrent database connections you anticipate as your applications scale.

The goal of this serverless developer guide is to give you directed learning paths for the core services you need to implement serverless solutions.

Serverless development lets you build applications without managing long-running servers, such as a provisioned Amazon EC2 instance. AWS serverless technologies are pay-as-you-go, can scale up and down as your application needs change, and are built to expand across AWS Regions to ensure resiliancy.

This guide will highlight what you need to know right away and link to service documentation for mroe servoce-specific details where needed.

For example, you'll learn that the Lambda service spins up environments to run compute functions, but to manage function scaling or reduce startup time, we'll link you to relevant sections of the Lambda developer guide.

The topics in this guide will cover the prerequisites to understanding serverless development on AWS, such as account creation and an overview of AWS cloud infrastructure. Then, you will learn how to shift from a traditional development model to a serverless, event-driven architectural model with which to develop applications on the cloud.

Along the way, this guide will introduce core services and additional articles, workshops, and tutorials, you can choose to reinforce your learning with hands-on activities.