Serverless tooling
Since this is the very first chapter that has application code and working examples, it's important to talk through some of the tooling and systems to set the stage for this and subsequent chapters. In this and the following chapters on web applications, our toolchain will consist of services from AWS:
- AWS API Gateway as the HTTP proxy
- AWS Lambda for computing
- AWS S3 for static file serving
- AWS CloudFront for the CDN
- AWS RDS for RDBMS management
- AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for free certificate management
While AWS is the dominant player in the Platform as a service (PaaS) ecosystem, it is by no means the only choice. While reading this chapter and others in this book, remember that the patterns presented should apply to any cloud provider, albeit sometimes with a certain degree of adaptation.
You may be questioning the reasoning behind discussing other services such as S3 and RDS. Very often, perhaps usually, when people say serverless they are talking about functions as a service...
