Use services instead of custom code
Serverless applications usually comprise several AWS services, integrated with custom code run in Lambda functions. While Lambda can be integrated with most AWS services, the services most commonly used in serverless applications are:
| Category | AWS service |
|---|---|
|
Compute |
AWS Lambda |
|
Data storage |
Amazon S3 Amazon DynamoDB Amazon RDS |
|
API |
Amazon API Gateway |
|
Application integration |
Amazon EventBridge Amazon SNS Amazon SQS |
|
Orchestration |
AWS Step Functions |
|
Streaming data and analytics |
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose |
There are many well-established, common patterns in distributed architectures that you can build yourself or implement using AWS services. For most customers, there is little commercial value in investing time to develop these patterns from scratch. When your application needs one of these patterns, use the corresponding AWS service:
| Pattern | AWS service |
|---|---|
|
Queue |
Amazon SQS |
|
Event bus |
Amazon EventBridge |
|
Publish/subscribe (fan-out) |
Amazon SNS |
|
Orchestration |
AWS Step Functions |
|
API |
Amazon API Gateway |
|
Event streams |
Amazon Kinesis |
These services are designed to integrate with Lambda and you can use infrastructure as code (IaC) to create and discard resources in the services. You can use any of these services via the AWS SDK
