News

AWS One-Stop Shop for Serverless Apps Now Available

• By David Ramel
• 02/26/2018

With serverless computing becoming increasingly popular in cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), the company has announced its one-stop shop to find such applications -- the AWS Serverless Application Repository -- is now generally available.

The AWS Serverless Application Repository can help users discover, configure, deploy and publish serverless applications. Such applications are not really technically "serverless," in that they are hosted on AWS servers. Rather, the term indicates that users don't have to manually provision, scale, configure or manage their own dedicated servers. Serverless computing also involves the use of Lambda functions -- code that is typically executed in response to events or commands.

"The Serverless Application Repository offers a growing collection of serverless applications for popular use cases like stream processing, media processing, logging and monitoring, Alexa skills, and more from publishers like Splunk, Datadog, Here, TensorIoT, and serverless developers around the world," AWS said in a post last week. "You can quickly find and deploy applications using the AWS Lambda console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs, and you can continue to use existing AWS and third-party tools to manage the deployed resources."

Developers and other users can publish their own apps to the repository, and they can be shared publically, privately or with selected teams and organizations.

"As a consumer, you will be able to tap in to a thriving ecosystem of serverless applications and components that will be a perfect complement to your machine learning, image processing, IoT, and general-purpose work. You can configure and consume them as-is, or you can take them apart, add features, and submit pull requests to the author," AWS said.

"As a publisher, you can publish your contribution in the Serverless Application Repository with ease. You simply enter a name and a description, choose some labels to increase discoverability, select an appropriate open source license from a menu, and supply a README to help users get started. Then you enter a link to your existing source code repo, choose a SAM template, and designate a semantic version."

AWS said using the repository involves no extra charge, as users are only responsible for AWS resources leveraged in deployed applications. The repository is available in a number of AWS regions in the U.S. and around the world.