This article will be the first of a series around SST. I will try to let you discover some amazing aspect of this particular solution in the serverless world.

So you start building using serverless principles, and you discover the Serverless framework. Great ! You will discover here another option, that I consider superior in multiple area, the Serverless Stack (SST). I will first introduce some basic concepts for beginners, then I will expose the main difference between the solutions. Let's dig into this!

Introducing some concepts

Serverless

Serverless is "is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers" (Wikipedia). It allow you to run backend functions or applications without managing any backend server, or containers. Each major cloud provider is providing today serverless solutions:

• Lambda on AWS
• Microsoft Azure Functions on Azure
• Cloud Functions on Google Cloud Platform

Basically you just define a function in a supported language, you push it to your cloud provider and voilà!, it's accessible and you don't have to deal with servers. It's the developer dream!

A very simple serverless function on AWS!

Framework for Serverless

Once you have build your first functions using serverless, you discover that the feedback loop to test something is generally longer that your local code:

• First you develop the function
• You need to deploy it on your cloud provider (manually maybe the first time)
• You need to wait for the deployment, attach HTTP trigger if it's a REST API for example (API Gateway for AWS)
• You test it (via Postman or using your web-application maybe)
• You detected a bug
• You get the log trace in the log system of the cloud provider (CloudWatch for AWS for example)
• Then your go back to the start of the list