Serverless Patterns

Serverless Patterns are reusable, ready-to-deploy architectures for wiring together serverless services — Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, Step Functions, and the rest — into working solutions without standing up or managing servers. AWS curates a large catalog of them on Serverless Land, each a small template that shows one proven way to connect two or more services. They are less a single standard than a shared library of good building blocks.

• Composable building blocks - Each pattern connects a handful of managed services into one job, like API Gateway to Lambda to DynamoDB, ready to copy and adapt.
• Infrastructure as code - Patterns ship as SAM, CDK, or CloudFormation templates, so the architecture is version-controlled and repeatable, not clicked together by hand.
• Event-driven by default - Many lean on EventBridge and queues, favoring loose coupling and asynchronous flow over tightly bound request chains.
• Cost and scale on demand - Compute runs only when invoked, which pushes cost toward actual usage and scale toward zero when idle.

In real API operations these patterns are how a lot of small, focused APIs actually get built and deployed today — an API Gateway fronting a function is one of the most common shapes I see across the providers I score. The catalog approach also fits the agentic turn well: a well-described, single-purpose serverless function is easy to expose as a tool, and the event-driven patterns give agents a natural way to trigger and chain work asynchronously rather than holding a connection open.