Lesson Outline

In this lesson, you'll learn to deploy serverless applications, using AWS Lambda. This lesson breaks up the topic of serverless applications into smaller concepts:

• What are Functions as a Service (FaaS)?
• Characteristics of cloud-native applications
• Creating an AWS Lambda function using Cloud9
• Responding to events, such as HTTP requests
• Creating a JSON response

Request-Response

Much of this lesson will rely on creating and understanding the request-response method of computer communication. From the Wikipedia page:

Request–response is one of the basic methods computers use to communicate with each other, in which the first computer sends a request for some data and the second responds to the request. Usually, there is a series of such interchanges until the complete message is sent; browsing a web page is an example of request–response communication.

Request–response can be seen as a telephone call, in which someone is called and they answer the call.

In this lesson, requests are typically HTTP requests with some input data, and a response will be a JSON-formatted set of output values.

By the end of this lesson, you'll have all the skills you need to develop and deploy serverless functions of your own design!