Features of Serverless Application Model

Let’s look at some of the features of AWS SAM that make it unique:

• Nested Stacks: SAM enables you to define nested stacks, modularizing and hierarchically arranging your serverless application resources. This can aid in managing resources and the reuse and upkeep your SAM templates.
• Globals Section: SAM offers a “Globals” section in the template where you can provide general characteristics that apply to numerous resources in your application. This helps centralize the setup of common settings, like memory size, timeout, and environment variables, for all Lambda functions in your application, making it easier to manage and maintain.
• EventBridge Event Sources: SAM allows you to use EventBridge as an event source for your Lambda functions. You may connect to and trigger Lambda functions based on events from multiple Amazon services, third-party SaaS applications, and custom applications by defining EventBridge event rules in your SAM template.
• Lambda Layers: You can define and maintain Lambda layers in your template using SAM. Lambda layers allow your application’s multiple Lambda functions to store and share common code, libraries, or resources. By doing so, code duplication is decreased, reuse is increased, and updating and maintaining shared code is simpler.
• Application Auto Scaling: SAM enables you to provide application auto-scaling rules in the template for your Lambda functions. Scaling policies can be specified based on various metrics, including CPU usage, concurrency, or custom CloudWatch metrics. This allows you to scale your Lambda functions up or down automatically depending on the actual demand for and usage of your application.
• Metadata and Tags: Adding tags and metadata to your serverless resources is possible with SAM. While tags can be used to classify, organize, and manage your resources with metadata-based policies or for billing purposes, metadata can give further information or documentation about your resources.
   

Assume you are developing a complicated web application that calls for numerous API Gateways, Amazon Lambda functions, and serverless resources. These resources require deployment, configuration, scale management, security, and performance optimizations. When using unprocessed CloudFormation templates, this can easily become time-consuming and overwhelming. The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), a strong framework that streamlines the process of creating, deploying, and managing serverless apps on AWS, steps in at this point.
 

Let’s imagine, for example, that you are developing a serverless application with several Lambda functions, an API Gateway, and an S3 bucket for file storage. With SAM, all of these resources can be defined in a single SAM template with a simple syntax to comprehend and administer. Each Lambda function’s runtime, memory, and other configurations, the endpoints and authentication for the API Gateway, and the bucket policies for the S3 bucket can all be defined in one location. Thanks to SAM’s integrated features for local testing, debugging, and deployment, your serverless applications may be developed and iterated upon with efficiency and convenience.