AWS Lambda Guide — Deploying
The Serverless Framework was designed to provision your AWS Lambda Functions, Events and infrastructure Resources safely and quickly. It does this via a couple of methods designed for different types of deployments.
#Deploy All
This is the main method for doing deployments with the Serverless Framework:
serverless deploy
Use this method when you have updated your Function, Event or Resource configuration in serverless.yml
and you want to deploy that change (or multiple changes at the same time) to Amazon Web Services.
Note: You can always enforce a deployment using the --force
option.
#How It Works
The Serverless Framework translates all syntax in serverless.yml
to a single AWS CloudFormation template. By depending on CloudFormation for deployments, users of the Serverless Framework get the safety and reliability of CloudFormation.
- An AWS CloudFormation template is created from your
serverless.yml
. - If a Stack has not yet been created, then it is created with no resources except for an S3 Bucket, which will store zip files of your Function code.
- The code of your Functions is then packaged into zip files.
- Serverless fetches the hashes for all files of the previous deployment (if any) and compares them against the hashes of the local files.
- Serverless terminates the deployment process if all file hashes are the same.
- Zip files of your Functions’ code are uploaded to your Code S3 Bucket.
- Any IAM Roles, Functions, Events and Resources are added to the AWS CloudFormation template.
- The CloudFormation Stack is updated with the new CloudFormation template.
- Each deployment publishes a new version for each function in your service.
#Tips
- Use this in your CI/CD systems, as it is the safest method of deployment.
- You can print the progress during the deployment if you use
verbose
mode, like this: serverless deploy --verbose
- This method uses the AWS CloudFormation Stack Update method. CloudFormation is slow, so this method is slower. If you want to develop more quickly, use the
serverless deploy function
command (described below) - This method defaults to
dev
stage andus-east-1
region. You can change the default stage and region in yourserverless.yml
file by setting thestage
andregion
properties inside aprovider
object as the following example shows: service: service-name provider: name: aws stage: beta region: us-west-2
- You can also deploy to different stages and regions by passing in flags to the command:
serverless deploy --stage production --region eu-central-1
- You can specify your own S3 bucket which should be used to store all the deployment artifacts. The
deploymentBucket
config which is nested underprovider
lets you e.g. set thename
or theserverSideEncryption
method for this bucket - You can make uploading to S3 faster by adding
--aws-s3-accelerate
Check out the deploy command docs for all details and options.
#Deploy Function
This deployment method does not touch your AWS CloudFormation Stack. Instead, it simply overwrites the zip file of the current function on AWS. This method is much faster, since it does not rely on CloudFormation.
serverless deploy function --function myFunction
-Note: You can always enforce a deployment using the --force
option. -Note: You can use --update-config
to change only Lambda configuration without deploying code.
#How It Works
- The Framework packages up the targeted AWS Lambda Function into a zip file.
- The Framework fetches the hash of the already uploaded function .zip file and compares it to the local .zip file hash.
- The Framework terminates if both hashes are the same.
- That zip file is uploaded to your S3 bucket using the same name as the previous function, which the CloudFormation stack is pointing to.
#Tips
- Use this when you are developing and want to test on AWS because it’s much faster.
- During development, people will often run this command several times, as opposed to
serverless deploy
which is only run when larger infrastructure provisioning is required.
Check out the deploy command docs for all details and options.
#Deploying a package
This deployment option takes a deployment directory that has already been created with serverless package
and deploys it to the cloud provider. This allows you to easier integrate CI / CD workflows with the Serverless Framework.
serverless deploy --package path-to-package
#How It Works
- The argument to the
--package
flag is a directory that has been previously packaged by Serverless (withserverless package
). - The deploy process bypasses the package step and uses the existing package to deploy and update CloudFormation stacks.
Originally published at serverless.com.