Serverless Developer Guide
Compute
• AWS Lambda - serverless compute functions; responsible for nearly all processing in serverless 
projects
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - non-serverless compute alternative; useful when you need 
always-on and fully customizable capabilities. EC2 is often used for initial “lift and shift” 
migration to the cloud. You can continue to use EC2 while migrating portions of your workﬂow 
to serverless patterns.
• AWS App Runner - fully managed service to deploy your containerized web applications and 
APIs. App Runner will scale compute instances and network resources automatically based on 
incoming traﬃc.
• AWS Fargate - serverless computer for clusters of containers; useful when you need custom 
containers but do not want to maintain and manage the infrastructure or cluster.
Security, identity & compliance
• IAM - identity and access management; provides policies to authorize service resources to 
interact with each other and your data.
• Amazon Cognito - authentication and authorization of users and systems
• AWS Secrets Manager - manage access to secrets using ﬁne-grained policies
Management & governance
• Amazon CloudWatch - suite of monitoring and logging services
• AWS Management Console - web-based user interface for creating, conﬁguring, and monitoring 
AWS resources and your code.
• AWS CloudFormation (CFN) - text templates to automate deploying infrastructure and code
• AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) - an open-source framework for deploying 
serverless application infrastructure and code. AWS SAM templates provide a shorthand syntax 
to declare functions, APIs, databases, and event source mappings. With just a few lines of 
conﬁguration per resource, you can deﬁne the application infrastructure components. During 
deployment, AWS SAM transforms and expands the template into verbose AWS CloudFormation 
templates.
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) - an open-source software development framework 
to deﬁne your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. Instead of 
Compute 33