Jamstack and Serverless

In recent years the term serverless has popped up more often in online discussions, articles and documentation for various products. Serverless computing, as well as serverless functions, genuinely change the way how (frontend) developers work and how they think about application architectures and services. With the rise of the Jamstack, utilising serverless functions is super important, especially if we would like to add dynamic features and server-side functionality to our statically generated apps.

Since the Jamstack deploys sites to CDN edge servers, which do not have a server-side execution environment, the question is, of course, how can we still securely execute server-side code? The answer is to utilise serverless functions. The great news is that serverless functions are agnostic to what other tools we use in the Jamstack - regardless of our headless CMS and static site generator of choice, we can use such functions without a problem.

This short video course walks you through what serverless computing is and how it's related to serverless functions. Then, following a few sample applications (hint: you may encounter your favourite Marvel character) you can also learn how to create and deploy a serverless function in Amazon (AWS Lambda) via a fantastic open-source framework called "Serverless Framework". Last but not least, in yet another example application discussed in this course, you will learn how to use Netlify Functions and how to test your application locally (yes, including the serverless functions) before learning how to deploy a static application that will be capable of sending a text message via Netlify Functions and Twilio.