Serverless Developer Guide
• Policies that grant least privilege to your functions
Workshop - Intro to Serverless - Before diving too deep, you can choose to try out serverless in 
a workshop or tutorial. Connect to a data source and create a REST API with your ﬁrst Lambda 
function.”
• Services used: AWS Management Console, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway
Programming Model
The Lambda service provides the same event-based programming model for all languages. The 
Lambda runtime passes an invocation event and context to your Lambda function handler which 
does some work and produces a resulting event:
The invocation event contains data, as a JSON packet, which varies from service to service. For 
example, API gateway events include path, HTTP method, query string parameters, headers, 
cookies, and more. DynamoDB events could contain updated or delete record data. S3 events 
include the bucket name and object key, among other things.
The context contains information about the environment the function is running inside. Additional 
contextual information can be set in familiar environment variables (ENV).
The function handler is a method in your function code that processes the inbound event. The 
handler, which is a standard function in your language of choice, does some work and emits a result 
event.
Fundamentals 51