Summary

Throughout this chapter, we took a hands-on approach with two popular serverless platforms--AWS and Iron.io. Using the serverless framework, we were able to quickly deploy our code to the AWS Lambda service. The actual deployment involved a few AWS services, exposing our little chunk of code as a REST API endpoint hitting AWS Lambda in the background. With all of the services being managed by AWS, we were left with a true serverless experience. Quite a powerful concept, if we think about it. Aside from AWS, Iron.io is another interesting serverless platform. Unlike real-time code execution on AWS Lamda, the code on Iron.io executes as scheduled/queued tasks (not to say that AWS does not have its own queued solution as well). While AWS Lambda natively supports Node.js, Java, Python, and .NET Core runtimes, Iron.io abstracts the language away by using Docker containers. Still, we were able to run PHP, even on AWS Lambda, by wrapping the PHP binary through Node.js.

The serverless approach...