The modern software world runs on application programming interfaces, otherwise known as APIs. There’s an API for everything: charging a credit card, sending an email, finding an address on a map, or hailing a taxi.

Likewise, the huge computing power of the cloud is entirely accessible via multiple layers of programming interfaces, including HTTP services and language-specific SDKs.

Cloud vendors such as AWS have thousands of endpoints available to every developer in the world and modern businesses ought to embrace these existing services to stay productive. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, businesses should focus on the core values and differentiators for their specific market and simply purchase, adopt and reuse the remaining services required from third parties that have proven themselves in their given niche.

This principle stands at the core of the philosophy behind serverless architecture: focus on the crucial bits. Serverless tech has a low barrier of entry and was designed with the intention to require little boilerplate code to use. This helps to explain why so many reliable APIs are an inherent part of serverless applications today. AWS Lambda functions, for their part, are used by developers as the glue between cloud services and internal as well as external API calls.