WTF is AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM)?

Building larger serverless applications can be tricky - creating many lambda functions as well as other resources such as DynamoDB tables, S3 buckets, API Gateways takes quite a lot of time if we were to do it manually from AWS Console. Not to mention other problems such as redeploying the app to a different region, reviewing the infrastructure etc.

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM for short) simplifies a lot of those issues.

Built with with best practices in mind it allows you to:

• define your infrastructure as code using a YAML template (which can go through code review!)
• define resources such as lambda functions, DynamoDB tables etc. in a much simpler way than doing it directly in CloudFormation (which SAM is built on top of)
• build and deploy a serverless application from a command line
• debug and test lambda functions locally using SAM CLI
• debug and test lambda functions from WITHIN your editor with AWS Toolkit extension

Take a look at WTF is AWS SAM in this quick 2 minute lesson