serverless-application-model VS sst-start-demo

The complete solution with SAM is available here.

There are many options to deploy Serverless Applications in AWS and one of them is SAM, the Serverless Application Model. I chose to use it here, because it doesn't add too many layers of abstraction between what's being deployed and the code we write and our infrastructure is quite simple.

The solution uses AWS SAM with the global configuration for Lambda functions and the public API you can use to access Apache Zeppelin. The stack deployment provides the URL as an output value.

When you combine this with the AWS Serverless Application Model you can also very easily include your dependencies. Or use a compiled language like golang for your Lambda functions. You simply run sam build before you run the aws cloudformation package and aws cloudformation deploy commands. SAM will build the binary and update the template to point to the newly built binary. Package will then upload it to S3 and replace the local reference to the S3 location. Deploy can then create or update the stack or you can use the CloudFormation integration in CodePipeline.

I'm a big fan of using an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach for any project. My go to tools for this are the Servlerless Application Model (SAM) and it's associated CLI (SAM CLI). For more official use cases and for cross platform apps I typically use Terraform.

AWS SAM

Kicking off the tour and not starting a war, but I'm going to be using the Serverless Application Model.

The diagram here is super simple. I'm going to write something a little later that shows how this code could fit into a bigger workflow, but for now, I'm keeping it basic. And yes, that's the SAM Squirrel in there.

Interestingly, AWS CDK and SAM are both explicitly mentioned. While CDK broadly addresses Infrastructure as Code, SAM is highlighted for its role in developing serverless data pipelines - a hugely underrated concept.

Naturally, there are several options available to declare your cloud resources. The options with the most popularity are the CDK, AWS CloudFormation, SST, Serverless framework, Terraform, and AWS SAM. There are others, but when talking about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), these are the ones you hear about most often.

https://docs.serverless-stack.com and https://www.serverless.com/ can support next. However serverless-stack is too new and serverless framework looks promising but it uses an old version of serverless plugin.

I'm new to serverless and I've recently discovered frameworks like the Serverless Framework and SST. I've seen examples of Lambda functions where people interact with DBs like DynamoDB, authenticating users with Cognito and using API Gateway to map routes (these are all AWS-specific terms), which seems to me like you can pretty much build a CRUD API on top of this. However, I've also seen examples like this one where you can deploy a backend framework such as Nest.js as a single lambda function.

Hey all, recently I've been learning a lot about serverless APIs and I discovered frameworks like Serverless and SST which look great. I then also discovered that you can apparently deploy a Nest.js backend as a lambda handler -- here is a relevant article. Has anyone tried this? If you are looking to start working on a new project, is it a good idea to combine these together, or would you be better off just writing individual lambda handlers without a framework like Nest?

Hosting NextJS apps on AWS I would recommend https://docs.serverless-stack.com/ which has an inbuilt CDK pre-configured NextJS setup or https://registry.terraform.io/modules/dealmore/next-js/aws/latest

I highly recommend serverless SST. https://docs.serverless-stack.com/

> The ability to move between the frontend, backend, and infrastructure code without having to learn a different language is invaluable to every member of the team.

I'm actually quite skeptical of this claim. Learning a new language isn't really a big deal unless you are using relatively "esoteric" stuff like clojure or elixir which really require an experienced consultant to train your team.

With AWS Chalice, we've been able to ship production scale code (for govcloud) in Python without any one of us breaking the environment by simply using separate staging. We were able to get PHP/Javascript developers to use it with barely any downtime. In fact it was more or less appreciated from the clean and simple nature of Python right from the get go.

This feels like way too much engineering from the get go. Here's my workflow with AWS Chalice and its super basic (I'm open to improvements here).

- checkout code from github

- run localhost and test endpoints written in python (exactly like Flask)

- push to development stage API gateway

- verify it is working as intended and this is when we catch missing IAM roles, we document them. if something is wrong with our AWS setup (we dont use CDK just simply use the AWS console to set everything up once like VPC and RDS)

- push to production stage API gateway

All this shimming, typescript (rule of thumb is ~40% more code for 20% improvement through less documentation and type errors, only really valid in large teams) separate AWS developer accounts seems overkill.

The one benefit I see from all this extra compartmentalization is if you are working in large teams for a large company since you are going to discover missing IAM roles and permissions anyways and is part of being an implicit "human AWS compiler trying different stackoverflow answers".

Some positives I see are CDK but if you are deploying your infrastructure once, I really don't see the need for it, unless you have many infrastructures that can benefit from boilerplate generation.

Happy to hear from all ends of the spectrum, serverless-stack could be something I explore this weekend but there's just so much going on and I'm getting lot of marketing department vibes from reading the website (like idea to ipo and typescript for all) and to top it off

going to https://docs.serverless-stack.com/ triggers an antivirus warning about some netlify url ( nostalgic-brahmgupta09582d1.netlify.app) what is going on here???

documentation which is top notch

On a related note, shout out to https://docs.serverless-stack.com/ which is kinda like Serverless Framework except build on the CDK. Much more solid IMHO

ServerlessStack framework