AWS SAM
AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is an open-source framework for building serverless applications on AWS. It provides a simplified syntax for defining serverless resources like AWS Lambda functions, API Gateway APIs, and DynamoDB tables, and includes a CLI tool for local testing, packaging, and deployment. SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to make it easier to create and manage serverless applications.
Developers should learn AWS SAM when building serverless applications on AWS, as it simplifies infrastructure-as-code by reducing boilerplate compared to raw CloudFormation. It's particularly useful for rapid prototyping, CI/CD pipelines, and managing complex serverless architectures with multiple Lambda functions and event sources. SAM's local testing capabilities also speed up development by allowing debugging without deploying to AWS.