Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda: Overview and Best Practices

For some organizations, the idea of “going serverless” can be daunting. But with an understanding of best practices – and the right tools — many serverless applications can be fully functional with only a few lines of code and little else.

Examples of fully-serverless-application use cases include:

• Web or mobile backends – Create fully-serverless, mobile applications or websites by creating user-facing content in a native mobile application or static web content in an S3 bucket. Then have your front-end content integrate with Amazon API Gateway as a backend service API. Lambda functions will then execute the business logic you’ve written for each of the API Gateway methods in your backend API.
• Chatbots and virtual assistants – Build new serverless ways to interact with your customers, like customer support assistants and bots ready to engage customers on your company-run social media pages. The Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Amazon Lex have the ability to apply natural-language understanding to user-voice and freeform-text input so that a Lambda function you write can intelligently respond and engage with them.
• Internet of Things (IoT) backends – AWS IoT has direct-integration for device messages to be routed to and processed by Lambda functions. That means you can implement serverless backends for highly secure, scalable IoT applications for uses like connected consumer appliances and intelligent manufacturing facilities.

Using AWS Lambda as the logic layer of a serverless application can enable faster development speed and greater experimentation – and innovation — than in a traditional, server-based environment.

We recently published the “Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda: Overview and Best Practices” whitepaper to provide the guidance and best practices you need to write better Lambda functions and build better serverless architectures.

Once you’ve finished reading the whitepaper, below are a couple additional resources I recommend as your next step:

1. If you would like to better understand some of the architecture pattern possibilities for serverless applications: Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes (re:Invent 2017 video)
2. If you’re ready to get hands-on and build a sample serverless application: AWS Serverless Workshops (GitHub Repository)
3. If you’ve already built a serverless application and you’d like to ensure your application has been Well Architected: The Serverless Application Lens: AWS Well Architected Framework (Whitepaper)