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The Power of Serverless: Visualizing Architectures with Lambda and API Gateway Icons

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. With serverless, your application still runs on servers, but all the server management is done by AWS. This means you don't have to provision, scale, or maintain servers to run your applications, databases, and storage systems.

The core of the AWS serverless offering revolves around AWS Lambda.

AWS Lambda: The Core of Serverless

AWS Lambda is an event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service. You simply upload your code, and Lambda handles everything required to run and scale your code with high availability.

When creating an architecture diagram, the AWS Lambda icon is your go-to symbol for any function-based, serverless logic. It clearly communicates that a piece of your application runs on-demand, without a dedicated server.

Amazon API Gateway: The Front Door

How do you invoke a Lambda function from the web? That's where Amazon API Gateway comes in. It acts as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on EC2 or code running on AWS Lambda.

Using the API Gateway icon in your diagrams shows the entry point for your serverless APIs. Connecting it to the Lambda icon with an arrow visually represents an API call triggering your serverless function.

Visualizing a Simple Serverless API

A typical serverless API architecture might look like this:

  1. A user makes a request to an endpoint.
  2. API Gateway receives the request and routes it.
  3. The gateway triggers an AWS Lambda function.
  4. The Lambda function processes the request, perhaps interacting with a DynamoDB database (another key serverless service).
  5. The result is returned through API Gateway to the user.

Using the correct, official icons for each of these services is crucial for clarity. On AWS Icon Scout, you can quickly find the icons for API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and more to build accurate and professional diagrams that everyone on your team can understand.