AWS for DevOps — Serverless

Chapter 9 — Serverless on AWS

Serverless means you write code and AWS handles everything else — provisioning, scaling, patching, and availability. You pay only when your code runs.

  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │              Serverless on AWS                    │
  │                                                   │
  │  Lambda           API Gateway      DynamoDB       │
  │  (Compute)        (HTTP endpoint)  (Database)     │
  │  ┌─────┐         ┌──────────┐    ┌──────────┐   │
  │  │ fn  │◀────────│  REST /  │    │ NoSQL    │   │
  │  │     │         │  HTTP API│    │ Tables   │   │
  │  └─────┘         └──────────┘    └──────────┘   │
  │     │                                  ▲          │
  │     └──────────────────────────────────┘          │
  │                                                   │
  │  SAM              Step Functions                  │
  │  (Deploy)         (Orchestrate)                   │
  │  ┌─────┐         ┌──────────┐                    │
  │  │Build│         │ Workflow │                    │
  │  │Test │         │ State    │                    │
  │  │Ship │         │ Machine  │                    │
  │  └─────┘         └──────────┘                    │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What You’ll Learn

Section	Topic	Key Concepts
9.1	Lambda Basics	Functions, handlers, runtimes, layers
9.2	API Gateway	REST APIs, HTTP APIs, integration with Lambda
9.3	DynamoDB for DevOps	Tables, keys, on-demand vs provisioned
9.4	SAM — Serverless Application Model	template.yaml, sam build, sam deploy
9.5	Event-Driven Architecture	S3 events, SQS triggers, EventBridge
9.6	Practice Exercises	Hands-on scenarios

When to Go Serverless

Use Serverless When	Use Containers/EC2 When
Variable/unpredictable traffic	Steady high traffic (cheaper at scale)
Short-lived tasks (< 15 min)	Long-running processes
Event-driven workloads	GPU / specialised hardware needed
Want zero server management	Need full OS control
Startup / small team	Large team with ops experience

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Next → Lambda Basics