

Since my days working at AWS, I've worked at companies that range from small VOIP startups, to established managed services companies with massive enterprise clients. Even in it's original, unpolished state - it was obvious that serverless technology was poised change the software development world in a big way. When I worked at AWS, I was one of the first Engineers to preview Lambda internally, and to use it before it was released to the public. I'm a DevOps Engineer by title, and a technical generalist with years of AWS Lambda development experience in practice. You can download the completed code for the course here. We'll be showing code in this manuscript along the way, but if you want to skip ahead: RPG players rejoice - we're creating a fully functional, dice-rolling chat bot for Slack! While the example bot will be for Slack, the same idea can be easily adapted to create a bot for Telegram, Discord, or nearly any other chat service with a bot API. In true newline-fashion, we'll get rolling with a practical application right away. Serverless on Lambda gives developers the resources needed to write, deploy, and maintain production-ready software - all without significant operational overhead. It's a relief to be able to get right into the code, without worrying about configuring operating systems, deploying containers, or scaling clusters.

While all of those things are possible with Lambda (especially cost savings which are common - but certainly not guaranteed), it's the development agility and reduction of operations overhead that drives my love for the service. Some developers love using serverless tech because it helps them save money, scale quickly, and deliver on reliability goals. We'll see that for certain common projects - like custom chat bot creation - AWS Lambda really shines for it's simplicity, affordability, and ability to integrate with the wider AWS ecosystem. In this newline course, we're going to learn what serverless technology is and isn't, and why it belongs in your developer toolbox. Serverless Computing may sound like a scary topic, but with the rise of AWS Lambda and mature tools supporting it - it's more approachable than ever.
