Preface

Serverless is a buzzword created to identify cloud services that are totally managed by the provider and have a different billing model where you pay only for the time that you use them, measured in a granularity of tenths of a second and not hours. Serverless Computing allows a wide range of applications to benefit from reduced costs, faster development, and much less trouble with availability and scalability. Those are enough reasons for you to start learning how to build serverless applications.

Besides teaching you what is and how to use serverless, this book offers a broader view on the subject. Serverless is frequently associated with FaaS and people don't realize that you can do much more with serverless than just running functions on demand. Serverless offers many services for databases, security, notifications, and others. I will teach you how to use them.

This book can be divided into the following three parts:

• Introduction: This is where you will be introduced to the serverless concepts and tools that will be used in this book. You will learn about AWS services and the Serverless Framework. This introduction ranges from Chapter 1, Understanding the Serverless Model, to Chapter 3, Using the Serverless Model.
• Building a serverless application: From Chapter 4, Hosting the Website, to Chapter 7, Managing a Serverless Database, you will follow how to develop and host a serverless application and build the frontend, backend, and data access layer.
• Advanced features: This book ends with Chapter 8, Securing the Serverless Application, to Chapter 10, Testing, Deploying, and Monitoring, giving you the knowledge of how to use serverless to implement security and real-time notifications in addition to how to test, deploy, and monitor your application.