Welcome to serverless
Over the next 15 sections you'll go from "I've heard of AWS Lambda" to confidently shipping complete, secured, production-style serverless applications. This is a hands-on first course: every concept is reinforced with a console walkthrough, a code exercise, or a lab — and the back half is built around full projects you can put on a résumé or GitHub.
You don't need any prior AWS experience. If you can read JavaScript, understand what an HTTP request is, and know what JSON looks like, you're ready.
What you'll build
The course is structured as a ladder — each project reuses and extends the skills from the last.
- Standalone Lambda functions — a greeting function and a random-quote API.
- A REST Notes API — full create/read/update/delete backed by DynamoDB.
- A Product Catalog backend — with real query patterns and indexes.
- A secured Task Management API — your end-to-end CRUD capstone.
- A production-style Todo App — deployed entirely with AWS SAM (no console clicking).
- Five bonus mini-projects — independent practice to cement the stack.
How the course is organized
The roadmap moves deliberately from fundamentals to full applications:
| Phase | Sections | What you'll be able to do |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | 1–2 | Set up AWS, the console, IAM, and cost guardrails |
| Compute | 3–4 | Write, configure, test, and monitor Lambda functions |
| APIs | 5–6 | Expose Lambda through API Gateway as a REST API |
| Data | 7–8 | Model and query data in DynamoDB from Lambda |
| Build | 9, 13 | Ship complete CRUD apps, the second via SAM |
| Operate | 10–12, 14 | Secure, monitor, automate, and optimize |
What you'll need
You'll set all of this up in Section 1 — nothing to install yet, just know what's coming:
- An AWS Free Tier account (Lesson 4)
- A code editor — VS Code recommended
- The AWS CLI v2, AWS SAM CLI, Postman, and Git (installed and verified in Lesson 5)
- Basic comfort with JavaScript, HTTP, and JSON
Our standard toolkit
To keep things consistent, every example in the course uses the same choices:
| Choice | We use |
|---|---|
| Runtime | Node.js 20 (LTS) |
| Language | JavaScript (ES2022, async/await) |
| Region | us-east-1 |
| AWS SDK | AWS SDK for JavaScript v3 (@aws-sdk/client-dynamodb, lib-dynamodb) |
| Infrastructure as Code | AWS SAM |
- This is a hands-on course — follow the labs in your own AWS account.
- You'll build from single Lambda functions up to a SAM-deployed Todo app.
- Everything fits the Free Tier; you'll add a billing alarm and clean up after every lab.
- All examples standardize on Node.js 20, AWS SDK v3, and
us-east-1.