Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. Serverless applications don't require you to provision, scale, and manage any servers. You can build them for virtually any type of application or backend service, and everything required to run and scale your application with high availability is handled for you.
Building serverless applications means that your developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises. This reduced overhead lets developers reclaim time and energy that can be spent on developing great products which scale and that are reliable.
There is no need to provision or maintain any servers. There is no software or runtime to install, maintain, or administer.
Your application can be scaled automatically or by adjusting its capacity through toggling the units of consumption (e.g. throughput, memory) rather than units of individual servers.
Serverless applications have built-in availability and fault tolerance. You don't need to architect for these capabilities since the services running the application provide them by default.
You don't have to pay for idle capacity. There is no need to pre- or over-provision capacity for things like compute and storage.
Delivering a production, serverless application at scale demands a platform with a broad set of capabilities. Here’s how AWS supports enterprise-grade serverless applications:
Power your business logic with AWS Lambda, which can act as the control plane and logic layer for all your interconnected infrastructure resources and web APIs.
Coordinate and manage the state of each distributed component or microservice of your serverless application using AWS Step Functions.
Choose from a broad set of data sources and providers that you can use to process data or trigger events in real-time. See our documentation for a list of responsive data sources.
Use the open source AWS Serverless Application Model to model and deploy your serverless applications and services. Continuously deliver your serverless applications using application lifecycle management tools such as AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild.
Leverage an ecosystem of third-party tools and open source projects that streamline the building, testing, and deployment of code from development to production. See our Ecosystems page for more information on developer tools.
Get started quickly with our collection of reusable templates or blueprints that make it easy for you to use integrations with popular third-party services (e.g., Slack, Algorithmia, Twilio, Loggly, Splunk, Sumo Logic, Box, etc).
Enforce compliance and secure your entire IT environment with logging, change tracking, access controls, and encryption. Securely control access to your AWS resources with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to create private virtual networks which only you can access.
AWS provides highly available, scalable, low-cost services that deliver performance for enterprise scale. AWS Lambda reliably executes your business logic with built-in features such as dead letter queues and automatic retries. See our customer stories to learn how companies are using AWS to run their applications.
Take your application and services global in minutes using our global reach. AWS Lambda is available in multiple AWS regions and in all AWS edge locations via Lambda@Edge. You can also run Lambda functions on local, connected devices with AWS Greengrass.
AWS provides a set of fully managed services that you can use to build and run serverless applications. You use these services to build serverless applications that don’t require provisioning, maintaining, and administering servers for backend components such as compute, databases, storage, stream processing, message queueing, and more. You also no longer need to worry about ensuring application fault tolerance and availability. Instead, AWS handles all of these capabilities for you, allowing you to focus on product innovation and get faster time-to-market.
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability.
Lambda@Edge allows you to run Lambda functions at AWS Edge locations in response to Amazon CloudFront events.
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Amazon API Gateway allows you to process hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls and handles traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed cloud database and supports both document and key-value store models.
Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application.
Amazon Kinesis is a platform for streaming data on AWS, offering powerful services to make it easy to load and analyze streaming data, and also providing the ability for you to build custom streaming data applications for specialized needs.
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
AWS provides tools and services that aid developers in the serverless application development process. AWS and its partner ecosystem offer tools for continuous integration and delivery, testing, deployments, monitoring and diagnostics, SDKs, frameworks, and integrated development environment (IDE) plugins.
Build virtually any type of application or backend service using a serverless architecture.
Below are a couple of use cases:
You can build serverless web applications and backends using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB to handle web, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), and chatbot requests.
Example: Web Application Reference Architecture: Diagram | Sample Code
Example: Mobile Backend Reference Architecture: Diagram | Sample Code
Bustle runs a serverless backend for its Bustle iOS app and websites using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. Serverless architectures allow Bustle to never have to deal with infrastructure management, so every engineer can focus on building out new features and innovating. Read the case study »
You can build a variety of real-time data processing systems using AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Example: Data Processing Reference Architecture: Diagram | Sample Code
Square Enix uses AWS Lambda to run image processing for its massively multiplayer online game. With Lambda, it was able to reliably handle spikes of up to 30 times normal traffic. It also lowered the time required for image processing from several hours to just over 10 seconds, and it reduced infrastructure and operational costs. Read the case study »
Example: Real-Time Streaming Data Reference Architecture: Diagram | Sample Code
Thomson Reuters uses a serverless architecture to process up to 4,000 events per second for its usage analytics service. The service reliably handles spikes of twice its normal traffic and has high durability. The company deployed the service into production in only five months using AWS. Read the case study »
