From the course: Building Serverless Apps with AI Services on AWS

What is serverless? - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: Building Serverless Apps with AI Services on AWS

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What is serverless?

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- [Instructor] We already introduced AI in the previous section. Now it's time to introduce the other keyword in the name of this course: Serverless. What does it mean that an application is serverless? One of the first things people say to me whenever I mention the word serverless is that there are still servers in serverless. Yes, there are. However, with serverless, we don't manage those servers. They're abstracted away. Similar analogy happens with virtual servers. They are bare metal machines running providing capacity to the virtual servers, but you don't need to manage them. Serverless applications are some levels of abstraction up. There are three main characteristics of serverless services. You don't need to manage infrastructure, or your configuration of infrastructure is minimal, you pay for what you use and the service automatically scales up and down following your needs. When people think of serverless, they think about compute, and that is not complete. Serverless services can be a compute service in which to run your code, as well as managed services that you can use to build your applications. Sometimes those services are refer as functions as a service, or FaaS. And the managed services are back end as a service, or BaaS. Most serverless applications are composed of managed services with functions to implement the specific business logic. Back end as a service or managed services are quite an old concept. Amazon S3 was one of the first back end as a services and AWS launched it in 2006. S3 allows you to store objects in the cloud without provisioning any storage infrastructure. It scales the storage capacity as much as you need, and you pay exactly for what you use. In this course, you will learn a lot of managed services and the AI services fall in this category, Amazon Bedrock as well, and also AWS Step Functions and EventBridge, two services that provides a lot of the logic for the applications that you will be building in this course. One of the first example of function as a service is AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda was launched in 2014. Lambda allows you to run code in the cloud without the need to deploy any server. Just write a simple function and upload it to the cloud. You are going to use AWS Lambda together with Amazon Bedrock in one of the last section of this course to provide business logic to a generative AI chatbot.

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