Journey from On prem to Serverless | Learn Serverless with Krish - E 06



The Serverless Framework is a framework that makes it easy to write event-driven functions for a myriad of providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Kubeless and more. For each provider, a series of events can be configured to invoke the function. The framework is open source and receives updates regularly.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is an abstraction layer in front of CloudFormation that makes it easy to write serverless applications in AWS. There is support for three different resource types: Lambda, DynamoDB and API Gateway. Using SAM Local, Lambda and API Gateway can be run locally through the use of Docker containers.

Both frameworks have in common that they generate CloudFormation. In other words: they both abstract CloudFormation so that you need to write less code to build serverless applications and to deploy Lambda functions The biggest difference is that Serverless is written to deploy FaaS (Function as a Service) functions to different providers. SAM on the other hand is an abstraction layer specifically for AWS using not only FaaS but also DynamoDB for storage and API Gateway for creating a serverless HTTP endpoint.

Another difference is that SAM Local allows you to run Lambda functions locally and to spin up an API Gateway locally. This makes it easier to develop and test Lambda functions without deploying them to AWS. With the Serverless framework you can also invoke Lambda functions from the command line, but only if they are deployed to AWS and available through API Gateway.