4 Solutions for Serverless Application Deployment: AWS SAM, Stackery, Serverless Framework, and Pulumi

Developers are groaning about the perceived difficulty of using serverless functions to create microservices and APIs. The reason for their groaning is the fact that now that they have just gotten, more or less, used to how to build, test, deploy, and deliver software through Docker containers, they are being forced to learn yet another "way of doing their jobs." AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), Stackery, Serverless Framework, and Pulumi all have developed solutions to popularize serverless development and operations through automating away much of the serverless-specific requirements. The following chart shows each product's individual approach and you will be able to read about the upsides and downsides in Enterprise Management Associated Top 3 Decision Guide for Serverless Technologies (launched on February 4; #EMATop3).

Comparison chart between AWS SAM, Stackery, Pulumi, and Serverless Framework. This chart shows how all 4 approaches find fundamentally different solutions to the same problem.

1. AWS SAM: Offers serverless-specific abstractions for AWS Cloud Formation to easily provide and update serverless functions and applications on AWS Lambda. SAM feels like a band-aid making up for Cloud Formation rapidly increasing in complexity.
   
2. Stackery: Stackery provides a beautiful visual template editor for DevOps teams to design simple and complex serverless environments for AWS Lambda in a collaborative manner and without having to learn the required YAML code. This will be even better when it supports Google Cloud Functions, Knative, Azure Functions, etc.
   
3. Serverless Framework: Serverless Inc. created the serverless framework to enable developers and DevOps team to manage their infrastructure definitions together with their actual application code. Ultimately, this could enable truly infrastructure-independent distributed applications that can move to wherever they can run in the most cost-effective manner.
4. Pulumi: Pulumi's approaches the infrastructure-as-code challenge from the "other side," meaning from the IDE-end. Developers typically are married to their IDEs and not too keen on learning how to write the latest and greatest YAML to access Azure, AWS, Google, or Kubernetes resources. Pulumi gives developers the standard code libraries they need to simply embed infrastructure code from within their IDE, while DevOps teams receive a dashboard for operations management.