Introducing AWS SAM

Before we learn about AWS SAM, let’s quickly look at what serverless is. Serverless is a way of developing, running, and operating applications without needing to manage their underlying infrastructure. You might wonder what the key difference is since you don’t manage any infrastructure in AWS, and you would be right.

You don’t have to manage any physical infrastructure in AWS, but if you run an EC2 instance, you need to take care of its underlying OSs, security, patches, and updates.

Then, you will need to consider AWS’s managed Relational Database Service (RDS), where you don’t have to worry about the underlying OS but you still have to tweak its parameters, carry out performance tuning by reorganizing queries and tables, and create database indexes.

Serverless doesn’t guarantee that no operational work will be required, but there are several differences between instance-based services (such as EC2, RDS, EMR...