Serverless Architectures in AWS

Serverless architecture is a design pattern where you create your application using AWS services that do not require you to provision, scale, or maintain any servers. All the cumbersome server management tasks are handled behind the scenes for you by AWS. By adopting a serverless architecture, you tremendously reduce the operational complexity of running your application, enabling you to focus on delivering new features faster without compromising security, reliability, and performance.

Typical Serverless Architecture in AWS:

Serverless technologies can be used to create large scale applications or to implement specific granular tasks and their use cases cover almost all bases of modern computing needs. One popular example is the web application pattern:

The web application pattern uses AWS Lambda with API Gateway for the business logic, DynamoDB as the database, and Amazon Cognito for user management. For the front-end, S3 is used to store all static content and CloudFront is leveraged as a CDN to speed up content distribution to end users.

AWS certificate manager natively integrates with API Gateway and CloudFront to serve end users over secure TLS connections easily. Similarly, Route53 enables configuring custom domains for the different service endpoints.

Benefits of Serverless Architecture:

• Takes away the complexity of server management (install, configure, update, administer).
• Serverless applications can scale very easily, either automatically or by adjusting capacity units for the constituent services.
• There is no need to pre- or over-provision capacity, cost can be maintained close to zero when your application is not under load.
• Built-in availability and fault tolerance.