Serverless Services on AWS: An Overview

As digitalization takes over, there are more and more serverless applications on the market. If you choose to develop a serverless application, you don’t have to spend money on infrastructure, own room for it, or hire a team for server maintenance. There are a lot of cloud providers that offer the necessary tools for developing such applications. One of them is AWS, the leader in cloud computing with various services in one place.

Read more: What is Serverless? 

Here is a list of AWS services that will help you to build and run your serverless application.

1. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda has an event-driven charge system, which means you pay exclusively for what you use. The only job that you have to do is code writing, whereas AWS Lambda fully takes care of infrastructure management. Activity spikes, disaster recovery, or cold starts aren’t a problem due to the automatic scalability of the cloud environment.

2. AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate runs containers on its own without your intervention. You don’t have to manage virtual machines manually or choose the service type, which makes the tool very helpful.

3. AWS DynamoDB

AWS DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service hosted by AWS. It’s fully managed, scales up and down easily without performance glitches, and meets all the compliance requirements. DynamoDB provides data encryption that protects sensitive data from stealing. With the AWS Management Console, you can analyze expenses and traffic. Backups of data on-demand allow you to store the data safely and retrieve it any time you need.

4. Amazon Aurora

Aurora is a relational database that stores data in columns, rows, and tables. The service is fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, which means the projects that already exist in these environments can be easily moved to Aurora. It works with better efficiency and scalability. Besides, Aurora is a part of the Amazon Relational Database Service.

5. Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS is a service for easy and safe message delivery. It connects two applications or an application and a user. You can choose notification type from many options: email, SMS, mobile push notifications, AWS  Lambda, HTTP, Amazon SQS, etc. There are many additional useful features, such as message ordering, archiving, filtering, and analysis. Last but not least, the service protects message content by encrypting keys.

6. Amazon SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service is a tool for message queuing in software systems. You can choose the best plan that fits your needs and customize it. The service is reliable due to high-security standards and message locking during processing. Also, Amazon SQS stores the data on multiple servers to ensure nothing is lost. 

7. AWS CloudWatch

Cloud computing is all about loads of tools and services and, sometimes, it’s hard to keep an eye on them. AWS CloudWatch tracks AWS launched services’ activity and provides an analysis of it. You can enable notifications for usage level, load increase, etc. 

8. Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a tool for analyzing and visualizing different types of data. The insights are displayed in a single dashboard, which has a scalability of up to 10,000 users. Your colleagues will have access to Amazon QuickSight from any device and network. If you seek more functions, choose QuickSight Enterprise edition. 

9. AWS Step Functions

This service helps to watch the app performance via a graphical console. It’s easy to monitor processes as single work unites inside the app. You can choose from many use cases, such as calling Lambda to perform certain tasks, starting virtual machine learning, or creating automated workflows.

10. Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is a part of the AWS serverless infrastructure. API developers use the tool to create APIs that access AWS or third-party web services. RESTful APIs are HTTP-based and ensure flawless communication between a server and a client. In addition, Amazon API Gateway supports other API kinds such as WebSocket.

11. Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito is a service for authentication, authorization, and user management for both web and mobile apps. It allows signing in using a password and a username, or social media accounts like Facebook. Amazon Cognito has two main features: user pools and identity pools that can be used either together or separately. User pools offer users sign-in alternatives, whereas identity pools allow users to connect to other AWS services. 

12. AWS KMS

AWS Key Management Service is a tool for protecting users’ data and privacy. You can use AWS KMS to create customer master keys that are protected by hardware security. The service is compatible with other AWS services. 

Read more: Serverless services on AWS