Containers and Serverless Recommendation Guide

Serverless Operating Model

Which one of the following best describes what you are looking for? If you need help, click here.

Run containerized applications icon

I would like to run containerized applications

You are looking to migrate or build containerized applications while getting many of the benefits of serverless. Your applications follow a traditional programming approach with long-running processes with a dedicated compute layer.
Just run code icon

I would like to just run code

You are looking to offload as much infrastructure management and operations overhead to AWS as you can and will build applications deployed as functions. This approach is well-suited to building event-driven applications or new synchronous web/request-response applications.
Run a basic web service icon

I want to run a basic web service

You are looking to run secure web applications and APIs at scale, and/or need to build, deploy, and run containerized applications easily, without prior infrastructure or container experience, and a fully managed service is desired.

Help me understand

You’re here because you expressed a desire to adopt an operating model for scaling and managing your application that shifts as much management of the underlying infrastructure resources to AWS as possible. With AWS serverless compute services, you leverage AWS’s best practices and expertise to improve your performance, scalability, availability, and security, so development teams can focus on writing code that solve business problems.

There are three primary options when using a serverless operating model on AWS:

1. Select “I would like to run containerized applications” if you’re looking for a comprehensive container orchestration service that delivers the easiest way for organizations to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications at any scale. This approach is well suited for when you want to run a new or existing service-based application that has been developed using a familiar programming approach. Python/Flask and Nodejs/Express are well-known and established web frameworks that fall under this category. It is ideal to speed migration of existing applications.

2. Select I would like to just run code” if you’re looking for a function-based serverless compute service that abstracts the underlying compute environment and runs your code in a highly available, scalable, secure, fault tolerant environment on your behalf. This frees up your team’s time to focus primarily on application development, speeding time to market, and lowering total cost of ownership.

3. Select “I want to run a basic web service” if you have a web app backend with a request/response pattern and would appreciate AWS handling the load balancing, patching, and scaling while also providing an out of the box CI/CD experience. We will recommend a fully managed container application service that lets you build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and API services without prior infrastructure or container experience.