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---
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title_tag: "Pulumi vs. Serverless Framework"
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meta_desc: Learn about the major differences between Pulumi and the Serverless Framework, and how Pulumi offers a more holistic approach to writing applications.
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title: Serverless Framework
h1: Pulumi vs. Severless Framework
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meta_image: /images/docs/meta-images/docs-meta.png
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menu:
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concepts:
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parent: vs
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weight: 5
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aliases:
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- /docs/reference/vs/serverless/
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- /docs/intro/vs/serverless/
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---
The Serverless Framework is a tool that makes programming AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions
easier, by removing much of the boilerplate out of the native cloud providers' development experiences. It generates
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the YAML and configuration required for functions, and simplifies uploading code packs to the cloud. The Serverless Framework relies on
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the cloud provider's APIs or templating solutions for any provisioning or management beyond the functions themselves.
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Pulumi is more holistic than the Serverless Framework in its focus. In Pulumi, you write entire applications -- some parts of which may be serverless
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functions -- but this might also include containers, databases, cloud services, or even virtual machines. It then uses
an infrastructure-as-code approach to deploy, update, and generally manage these constellations of resources.
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Where Serverless Framework treats each function as a configurable entity, Pulumi views the entire program as a cloud native
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program. This means in practice that most Serverless Framework solutions also need to involve other solutions -- like
AWS CloudFormation -- and that you as a user are left orchestrating changes in multiple systems.
This often leads to the very "pile of bash scripts" problems that you had sought to solve in the first place.
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For a good specific comparison of Pulumi and the Serverless Framework, refer to this example: [the before code using the Serverless Framework ](https://serverless.com/blog/serverless-application-for-long-running-process-fargate-lambda/ ) takes about 38 pages
of explanation, including manual steps and AWS CloudFormation; [the after code using Pulumi ](https://github.com/pulumi/examples/tree/master/cloud-js-thumbnailer ) is only about 38 lines of code.
