How do you build, test, and deploy serverless applications?
Use AWS CDK and CloudFormation for reproducible infrastructure, test business logic and cloud integrations, and promote immutable changes with safe rollback.
How do you build, test, and deploy serverless applications?
A reliable serverless delivery process defines application infrastructure and configuration as code, produces immutable artifacts, tests business logic and real managed-service integrations, reviews the planned infrastructure change, and deploys through controlled environments with observable rollback or roll-forward paths.
How this topic fits
Delivery
Define infrastructure as code, test cloud integrations, promote immutable changes, and deploy with controlled rollback paths.
Define the complete workload as infrastructure as code
AWS CDK lets teams define constructs, stacks, and applications in supported programming languages and synthesizes AWS CloudFormation templates for deployment. Include functions, APIs, events, queues, data, IAM, alarms, dashboards, encryption, and recovery configuration so an environment is reproducible.
Keep business boundaries visible in stack organization. Review synthesized changes and security-sensitive policies; an abstraction is useful only when engineers can still understand the resources and permissions it creates.
Test code quickly and integrations in the cloud
Separate handlers from business logic so unit tests can exercise rules without an AWS runtime. Add contract tests for events and APIs, infrastructure assertions for critical configuration, and integration tests that use isolated AWS resources.
Cloud tests reveal IAM, networking, service configuration, quotas, serialization, and managed-service behavior that mocks cannot reproduce. End-to-end tests should verify important synchronous and asynchronous outcomes, including failure and retry paths.
Promote immutable versions through controlled stages
Build once, identify the artifact, and promote the same tested version with environment-specific configuration kept separate. Lambda versions and aliases can provide stable invocation targets and weighted traffic shifting where supported by the deployment design.
Review infrastructure diffs, database or event-schema compatibility, IAM changes, alarms, and rollback prerequisites before production. Avoid combining a difficult data migration and an unrelated architecture change in one recovery boundary.
Make every change observable and recoverable
Record deployment markers with metrics and traces. Use canary or gradual exposure when risk warrants it, compare business and system signals, and stop automatically or manually when thresholds are crossed.
Rollback code only works when events, schemas, data, and configuration remain backward compatible. Test rollback, queue replay, failed workflow recovery, and emergency access before they are needed.
Go deeper with AWS
Read the primary AWS documentation behind the service definitions and architecture guidance in this guide.
Next steps
Continue with the concepts that most directly shape this decision.
Lambda packages, layers, and extensions
Choose Lambda ZIP or container-image packaging, use layers deliberately, understand extensions, and keep deployment artifacts small and governable.
Serverless resilience and quotas
Turn availability goals into timeouts, backpressure, isolation, quota planning, recovery procedures, multi-AZ assumptions, and tested failure modes.
Questions about this topic
Browse all serverless concepts
Explore compute, APIs, events, workflows, data, security, reliability, operations, delivery, and AI from one connected AWS serverless learning path.
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Understand how AWS Lambda runs code, how functions are invoked, where permissions and state live, and when Lambda is a good compute choice.
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Learn how managed compute, APIs, events, queues, workflows, data, identity, and observability fit together in a serverless architecture on AWS.
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A practical guide to identity, least privilege, event validation, secrets, data protection, dependencies, and incident visibility in AWS serverless systems.
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What is cloud computing?
Understand how on-demand infrastructure and managed services change the way teams provision, scale, pay for, and operate software systems.
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Learn how producers, routers, and consumers communicate through events, and how to design schemas, delivery, retries, and ownership deliberately.
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Understand the request path, authentication, routing, compute, data, throttling, observability, and failure controls behind a serverless API on AWS.
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Learn when explicit workflow state improves retries, branching, parallel work, human approval, visibility, and recovery in distributed applications.
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Learn how API Gateway creates, publishes, secures, monitors, and operates HTTP, REST, and WebSocket APIs for AWS and external backends.
What is Amazon EventBridge?
Understand EventBridge event buses, rules, pipes, schemas, targets, schedules, permissions, delivery, and recovery in event-driven AWS systems.
Make the next serverless decision explicit.
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