The Serverless Framework is a free open source framework that allows us to easily build applications on cloud providers like AWS using serverless computing. 

As developers and professionals it’s important to try and update our dependencies regularly because of security and productivity improvements. Even when it’s hard, and requires quite a bit of effort it’s usually well worth the pain. That being said, there’s been a number of great improvements to the Serverless Framework over the last few months.

As you may remember, it needs to be installed globally which means we need to do the update globally and we’ll need to potentially update all of our projects for any breaking changes.

Updating to the latest version of the serverless framework is as simple as running the below from the command line:

npm install -g serverless

Here’s an example of the process running in the terminal

Immediately after doing this update, it’s important to go through our actual code and determine what needs to be changed. I find the easiest way to do this is to go through the release notes and determine what has actually changed and what needs to be changed.

I like to try and get one endpoint or function working locally before I make a big push to get everything working and push it to the cloud provider. If you update at least monthly, the number of changes you need to make should be much smaller in scope and the learning curve is a lot simpler.