Scale to Zero AWS vs. Serverless Comparison Chart

Run code without thinking about servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume. AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app. AWS Lambda automatically runs your code without requiring you to provision or manage servers. Just write the code and upload it to Lambda. AWS Lambda automatically scales your application by running code in response to each trigger. Your code runs in parallel and processes each trigger individually, scaling precisely with the size of the workload.

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources, such as Zendesk, Datadog, or Pagerduty, and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. You can set up routing rules to determine where to send your data to build application architectures that react in real time to all of your data sources. EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven applications because it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error handling for you. As your applications become more interconnected through events, you need to spend more effort to find events and understand their structure in order to write code to react to those events.

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Cloud Run is a fully-managed compute platform that lets you run your code in a container directly on top of Google's scalable infrastructure. We’ve intentionally designed Cloud Run to make developers more productive - you get to focus on writing your code, using your favorite language, and Cloud Run takes care of operating your service. Fully managed compute platform for deploying and scaling containerized applications quickly and securely. Write code your way using your favorite languages (Go, Python, Java, Ruby, Node.js, and more). Abstract away all infrastructure management for a simple developer experience. Build applications in your favorite language, with your favorite dependencies and tools, and deploy them in seconds. Cloud Run abstracts away all infrastructure management by automatically scaling up and down from zero almost instantaneously—depending on traffic. Cloud Run only charges you for the exact resources you use. Cloud Run makes app development & deployment simpler.

AWS Step Functions is a serverless function orchestrator that makes it easy to sequence AWS Lambda functions and multiple AWS services into business-critical applications. Through its visual interface, you can create and run a series of checkpointed and event-driven workflows that maintain the application state. The output of one step acts as an input to the next. Each step in your application executes in order, as defined by your business logic. Orchestrating a series of individual serverless applications, managing retries, and debugging failures can be challenging. As your distributed applications become more complex, the complexity of managing them also grows. With its built-in operational controls, Step Functions manages sequencing, error handling, retry logic, and state, removing a significant operational burden from your team. AWS Step Functions lets you build visual workflows that enable fast translation of business requirements into technical requirements.

FusionAuth is a modern, developer-focused identity and access management platform built to give you full control over your authentication stack. Whether you’re building a startup app or managing enterprise-scale infrastructure, FusionAuth delivers all the must-have features — from login and SSO to advanced protocols like OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, and WebAuthn — in a self-hostable or cloud-native package. Designed with developers in mind, FusionAuth integrates seamlessly with any language, framework, or architecture. Every capability is API-first and built for extensibility, so you can tailor authentication workflows without getting locked into rigid, inflexible systems. FusionAuth supports all the key use cases — user registration, multi-factor authentication (MFA), passwordless login, role-based access control, and more — while helping you stay compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and other regulatory standards.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. Customers such as Intel, Snap, Intuit, GoDaddy, and Autodesk trust EKS to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability. EKS is the best place to run Kubernetes for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your EKS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, EKS is deeply integrated with services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling Groups, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), providing you a seamless experience to monitor, scale, and load-balance your applications.

The new standard in online payments. Stripe is the best software platform for running an internet business. We handle billions of dollars every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world. Stripe builds the most powerful and flexible tools for internet commerce. Whether you’re creating a subscription service, an on-demand marketplace, an e-commerce store, or a crowdfunding platform, Stripe’s meticulously designed APIs and unmatched functionality help you create the best possible product for your users. Millions of the world’s most innovative technology companies are scaling faster and more efficiently by building their businesses on Stripe. We believe that payments is a problem rooted in code, not finance. We obsessively seek out elegant, composable abstractions that enable robust, scalable, flexible integrations. Because we eliminate needless complexity and extraneous details, you can get up and running with Stripe in just a couple of minutes.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. AWS Glue provides all the capabilities needed for data integration so that you can start analyzing your data and putting it to use in minutes instead of months. Data integration is the process of preparing and combining data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. It involves multiple tasks, such as discovering and extracting data from various sources; enriching, cleaning, normalizing, and combining data; and loading and organizing data in databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. These tasks are often handled by different types of users that each use different products. AWS Glue runs in a serverless environment. There is no infrastructure to manage, and AWS Glue provisions, configures, and scales the resources required to run your data integration jobs.

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that simplifies building and scaling generative AI applications by providing access to a variety of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon itself. Through a single API, developers can experiment with these models, customize them using techniques like fine-tuning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and create agents that interact with enterprise systems and data sources. As a serverless platform, Amazon Bedrock eliminates the need for infrastructure management, allowing seamless integration of generative AI capabilities into applications with a focus on security, privacy, and responsible AI practices.