AWS Compute Blog

Getting started with serverless

This post is contributed by Maureen Lonergan, Director, AWS Training and Certification

We consistently hear from customers that they’re interested in building serverless applications to take advantage of the increased agility and decreased total cost of ownership (TCO) that serverless delivers. But we also know that serverless may be intimidating for those who are more accustomed to using instances or containers for compute.

Since we launched AWS Lambda in 2014, our serverless portfolio has expanded beyond event-driven computing. We now have serverless databases, integration, and orchestration tools. This enables you to build end-to-end serverless applications—but it also means that you must learn how to build using a new serverless operational model.

For this reason, AWS Training and Certification is pleased to offer a new course through Coursera entitled AWS Fundamentals: Building Serverless Applications.

This scenario-based course, developed by the experts at AWS, will:

  • Introduce the AWS serverless framework and architecture in the context of a real business problem.
  • Provide the foundational knowledge to become more proficient in choosing and creating serverless solutions using AWS.
  • Provide demonstrations of the AWS services needed for deploying serverless solutions.
  • Help you develop skills in building and deploying serverless solutions using real-world examples of a serverless website and chatbot.

The syllabus allocates more than nine hours of video content and reading material over four weekly lessons. Each lesson has an estimated 2–3 hours per week of study time (though you can set your own pace and deadlines), with suggested exercises in the AWS Management Console. There is an end-of-course assessment that covers all the learning objectives and content.

The course is on-demand and 100% digital; you can even audit it for free. A completion certificate and access to the graded assessments are available for $49.

What can you expect?

In this course you will learn to use the AWS Serverless portfolio to create a chatbot that answers the question, “Can I let my cat outside?” You will build an application using every one of the concepts and services discussed in the class, including:

At the end of the class, you can audibly interact with the application to ask that essential question, “Can my cat go out in Denver?” (See the conversation in the following screenshot.)

Serverless Coursera training app

Across the four weeks of the course, you learn:

  1. What serverless computing is and how to create a chatbot with Amazon Lex using an S3 bucket to host a web application.
  2. How to build a highly scalable API with API Gateway and use Amazon CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) for your site and API.
  3. How to use Lambda to build serverless functions that write data to DynamoDB.
  4. How to apply lessons from the previous weeks to extend and add functionality to the chatbot.

Serverless Coursera training

AWS Fundamentals: Building Serverless Applications is now available. This course complements other standalone digital courses by AWS Training and Certification. They include the highly recommended Introduction to Serverless Development, as well as the following: