AWS Serverless Patterns and Anti-Patterns: What Works, What Breaks, and When to Use What

Serverless on AWS isn't "just use Lambda." It's a design philosophy: let AWS manage the infrastructure, pay only for what you use, and build with managed services that scale independently. But the patterns that work in serverless are fundamentally different from traditional architectures — and the anti-patterns are expensive to learn the hard way.

This guide covers the patterns that work in production, the anti-patterns that waste money or cause outages, and the decision framework for when serverless is the right (or wrong) choice.

The Serverless Building Blocks

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│ AWS SERVERLESS STACK │