Serverless applications have become mainstream more quickly than I ever could have imagined. Every second of every day, countless AWS Lambda functions spring to life on an as-needed basis, take care of some critical business function, and then finish up. Our users tell us that they love the flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of this model.

We want to make sure that every AWS customer moves ahead into the serverless future. After the launch of Lambda, we followed up with the Serverless Application Model (SAM) to further simplify the process of deploying and managing serverless applications on AWS. We have also published serverless reference architectures for web apps, mobile backends, image recognition & processing, real-time file processing, IoT, MapReduce, real-time stream processing, and image moderation for chatbots.

Today I would like to tell you about the next step forward. We want to make it as easy as possible for AWS customers to discover and deploy serverless apps. We also want to strengthen the open source community around Lambda, SAM, and serverless apps, with room for everyone to share, participate, and benefit.

AWS Serverless Application Repository

I’m pleased to be able to give you a peek at the upcoming AWS Serverless Application Repository. Designed for producers and consumers of serverless apps, this AWS Console component supports publishing, discovery, and deployment.

Producers (developers, ISVs, SaaS providers, and AWS partners) can easily publish to the repository. Apps must be in SAM format, accompanied by a SPDX license identifier, with options to share globally (for all AWS customers) or privately (with access controls for individuals and teams). Source code and other application components can be stored in GitHub or another source code repository, and then included via reference; again with control over sharing.

We’re looking forward to your submission. It will join others in progress from Datadog, Here, Splunk, and SignalFx.

For Publishers

If you are already using SAM to build serverless apps, we’re just about ready to start accepting contributions. As a quick refresher, SAM lets you define Amazon API Gateway APIs, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and AWS Lambda functions that are triggered by API actions and uploads to S3. Your serverless app can use third-party libraries as long as they are available under an open source license that has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). You will be able to use resource-based IAM policies to control access to your app—you can keep it private, grant cross-account access on an extremely selective basis, or make it available publicly.

For Consumers

You will be able to find and start using the apps from the Lambda console:

You will also be able to check on the status of each app:

Stay Tuned

All of this functionality will be accessible from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and a rich set of APIs. I’ll be sharing more info as it becomes available.

If you are ready to get started, you can sign up for the Preview!

— Jeff;