Hello and welcome to this learning path dedicated to serverless platform services on AWS. Throughout this learning path, you will be introduced to a number of AWS services that have been designed for you to use and operate, without having to provision any underlying infrastructure and management of the underlying platform that the service runs on, for example, OS maintenance, capacity provisioning, and patching.

AWS defines its serverless services as “the native architecture of the cloud that enables you to shift more of your operational responsibilities to AWS, increasing your agility and innovation.” Source: https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/

This level of abstraction when compared to other services, for example, EC2, results in a shift of responsibilities when looking at the shared responsibility model. For more information of the shared responsibility model and how this shift occurs, please see my existing blog post here where I discuss it in greater detail.

This Learning Path provides an introduction to the following serverless platform services:

Amazon Simple Notification Service: SNS is used as a publish and subscribe messaging service and is centered around topics. You can think of a topic as a group for collecting messages. Users or endpoints can then subscribe to a topic where messages or events can be published. When a message is published, all subscribers to that topic receive a notification of that message.
Amazon Simple Queue Service: SQS is a fully managed service offered by AWS that works seamlessly with serverless systems, microservices, and any distributed architecture. Although it's simply a queueing service for messages between components, it does much more than that. It has the capability of sending, storing, and receiving these messages at scale without dropping message data, as well as utilizing different queue types depending on requirements.
Amazon Simple Email Service: The SES service provides an automated email system to communicate with your customers. This makes it a good choice for marketers and developers. For example, you could use SES to send a confirmation email to customers, notifying them of their new account details that's set up on your website or an email confirmation sent to a customer detailing their online order placed by your site.
Amazon Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. With Amazon Kinesis you can ingest real-time data such as application logs, website clickstreams, IoT telemetry data, and more into your databases, your data lakes, and data warehouses, or build your own real-time applications using this data.
AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that has been designed to allow you to run your application code without having to manage and provision your own EC2 instances. This saves you having to maintain and administer an additional layer of technical responsibility within your solution. Instead, that responsibility is passed over to AWS to manage for you.
Amazon Simple Storage Service: Amazon S3 is a fully managed, object-based storage service that is highly available, highly durable, very cost-effective, and widely accessible. The service itself is promoted as having unlimited storage capabilities making Amazon S3 extremely scalable, far more scalable than your own on-premise storage solution could ever be.
Amazon API Gateway: The AWS API Gateway is a managed service for building, deploying, and scaling various types of APIs. These may be serverless Lambda-based applications, traditional HTTP-based back-end services, or even other AWS services. Generally speaking, the API Gateway can remove some overhead in managing multiple APIs by baking in monitoring, logging, throttling, caching, and other infrastructural requirements.
Amazon DynamoDB: Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service. There is no database administration required on your end, no servers to manage, no levers to tune, and nothing to back up. All of this is handled for you by AWS. All you have to do is set up your tables and configure the level of provisioned throughput that each table should have.

By the end of this learning path, you will have a greater understanding of all of the AWS services discussed, knowing when, why and how to get started in implementing some of them into your solutions. Ok, let’s get started!

Introduction: Serverless Platform Services on AWS