Exploring AWS Serverless Beyond Lambda & API Gateway

When we think about serverless, we often think about Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, but there's a wealth of options out there. AWS came to re:Invent 2021 with Serverless in a very big way, launching services like AWS Serverless Redshift or Serverless Managed Kafka. These are very, very powerful paradigms, and people often focus way too much on just API Gateway and just AWS Lambda despite there being a plethora of such amazing services.

Let's dive a little deeper. AWS Lambda gets you the compute while Amazon API Gateway gets you to network ingress. But what about API design? There are services like AWS AppSync that will allow you to build the GraphQL API with VTL transformers and other capabilities that can talk to Amazon DynamoDB, to Amazon RDS, as well as to just a plain AWS Lambda function that can go and fetch any data you'd like.

You can build incredibly advanced applications with serverless technologies. And one of the best ways of building out a serverless app is to use Amazon DynamoDB, which is a tremendously powerful database system that's globally available with global tables. And it even has ACID transactions in a single region. You can build very, very powerful apps that scale to billions of users and hundreds of millions of requests per second.

There's a great talk from re:Invent 2017 where Snapchat talks about how they built their stories feature on top of Amazon DynamoDB. So there should be no myth or issue with thinking about how serverless can scale. Serverless can scale to any workload and the best part about it is that it can also scale to zero.

When you're not using your infrastructure, you're not paying anything. Amazon Aurora Serverless in particular is great at this. You can provision Aurora capacity units. You can scale down to zero when your database isn't in use, and then you can scale up to thousands and thousands of units of capacity any time you want. All in all, the amount of options that are available to build out serverless architectures on AWS in 2022 look amazing, and you can build any application you can dream up.

If you’d like help with leveraging technologies such as serverless to modernize your existing applications on AWS or build net-new applications that are truly cloud-native, get in touch with our experts to determine the best approach.