If you’re new to AWS and Serverless then you’re in the right place!
What is serverless
People have lots of different ways to define makes something “serverless”, but here’s my best:
Solutions built with managed services, where the developer doesn’t need to think about the underlying servers.
Sam Williams
Obviously, there are servers running behind every Lambda and Dynamo table, but you just don’t need to think about that.
Why Serverless matters
The reason that you should care about Serverless is that it can completely change the way that you build software.
It does that in two ways – premade services and managed services.
Before serverless, if you wanted to get the text from an image, convert video formats, or just have a robust user login experience, you would have had to build it from scratch.
Now you’ve got Textract, MediaConvert, and Cognito which can be really easily set up. They work incredibly well with the rest of the AWS services. This allows you to connect multiple of them together to create a really powerful product – with far less work.
You also have managed services like AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3. You just give Lambda some code and the security, redundancy, scalability, and networking are all handled for you.
This means you can focus on building the best possible product. This is game-changing!
Two paths to building Serverless – Serverless framework vs Amplify
When you want to build your first Serverless product, there are two tools that I would recommend starting with. The Serverless Framework or AWS Amplify.
Which of these is best for you depends on what you want to do. To help you I’ve got some questions to help you:
- I want to make serverless development my career – The Serverless Framework
- I want an easy way to deploy and host my website – AWS Amplify
- I want to be able to grow my App, adding new features and services – The Serverless Framework
- I want to build a simple App with some database and login – AWS Amplify
