Bestseller

AWS Serverless Architecture Handbook

by Stephen Philip Thomas

The definitive guide to building production-ready serverless applications on AWS. Spanning 400+ pages, this handbook covers everything from S3 storage strategies and Lambda function patterns to Step Functions orchestration, API Gateway design, and enterprise security. Each chapter pairs deep AWS service knowledge with real-world scenarios, architectural diagrams, and field-tested solutions you can apply immediately.

What You'll Learn

• Design and implement production-grade serverless architectures using Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, and DynamoDB
• Master S3 storage classes, encryption, lifecycle policies, and performance optimization for enterprise workloads
• Build event-driven systems with SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge for real-time data processing at scale
• Implement CI/CD pipelines with CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and SAM for automated serverless deployments
• Secure your applications with Cognito authentication, IAM policies, KMS encryption, and CloudTrail auditing
• Debug and optimize with X-Ray tracing, CloudWatch metrics, and fault injection testing for resilient architectures

Full Table of Contents

1. 1 Introduction and Why Amazon S3 Comes First — Storage classes, encryption (SSE-S3), Object Lock, Glacier retrieval, access logging, CloudFront integration, and CloudFormation lifecycle
2. 2 AWS Storage Gateway — Tape Gateway deep dive, virtual tape libraries, backup-software integration, lifecycle rules, and cost-effective long-term archival
3. 3 High Performance & Parallel File Systems — Amazon FSx overview, FSx for Windows File Server, FSx for Lustre, and best practices
4. 4 CloudWatch Concepts — Standard and high resolution metrics, monitoring strategies, and alarm configuration
5. 5 AWS SQS — Visibility timeout, in-flight messages, fanout notifications, message timers, delay queues, and long polling optimization
6. 6 Simple Notification Service (SNS) — Pub/sub messaging, message retries, dead-letter queues, and fan-out patterns
7. 7 Kinesis — Data streams, Firehose, shard management, initial shard count calculation, and Lambda consumers
8. 8 API Gateway — Stage variables, Lambda proxy and non-proxy integration, CORS configuration, canary deployments, WebSocket preflight, and monitoring
9. 9 AWS X-Ray Concepts — Segments, subsegments, traces, sampling rules, annotations vs metadata, filter expressions, and Lambda integration
10. 10 AWS DevOps — CodeBuild, CodeDeploy (AppSpec hooks, rollback), CodePipeline, CloudFormation intrinsic functions, conditionals, and EC2 Image Builder
11. 11 AWS CodeCatalyst — Overview of Amazon CodeCatalyst for unified development
12. 12 JSONPath — Expression syntax, advanced queries, array operations, regex matching, and Step Functions Pass state integration
13. 13 Step Functions — State machine design, InputPath, Parameters, ResultSelector, ResultPath, OutputPath, order of operations, and best practices
14. 14 Event Object — Monitoring, debugging, and JSONPath integration with event payloads
15. 15 Context Object — Debugging, monitoring, and advanced uses of the Step Functions context object
16. 16 Types of State Machines — Standard vs Express Workflows: when to use each and trade-offs
17. 17 Intrinsic Functions — States.UUID, States.Hash, States.ArrayContains, Base64 encoding/decoding
18. 18 Callback Pattern — Asynchronous task integration, customer support use cases, and implementation examples
19. 19 Versioning State Machines — Publishing versions, managing versions via API, and console execution
20. 20 Security — Web identity federation, Cognito, Parameter Store, CloudTrail, IAM roles, KMS, AWS Config, session policies, and PassRole
21. 21 DynamoDB — Read/write capacity modes, auto scaling, DAX, GSI optimization, encryption at rest, transactional operations, and capacity calculations
22. 22 RDS Relational Database Service — MySQL connectivity, performance diagnostics, and ElastiCache Redis caching patterns
23. 23 Data Pipeline — AWS Data Pipeline components, source/destination configuration, and use cases
24. 24–30 Amazon Cognito (6 chapters) — User Pools, Identity Pools, role-based access control, Lambda triggers, tokens, Cognito Sync, and code samples
25. 31 Route 53 — Blue-green deployment, alias records, zone apex, record sets, latency-based routing, and DNS resolvers
26. 32 Elastic Beanstalk — Traffic-splitting deployment, application versioning, and environment management
27. 33 Security Token Service API — STS operations, DecodeAuthorizationMessage, and mobile authentication with external providers
28. 34 Serverless Application Model (SAM) — Deployment preferences, Lambda aliases, traffic shifting, policy templates, KMS encryption, and local debugging
29. 35 Fault Injection Simulator — Chaos engineering, experiment templates, and application resiliency testing
30. 36 Elastic Container Services (ECS) — Dynamic port mapping, Fargate pods, EKS integration, ALB ingress, ECR access, and task definitions
31. 37 Certificate Authority — TLS/SSL certificates, PKI chain of trust, code signing, ACM, DNSSEC, and AWS Private CA