The Serverless Framework is the tool we are going to be using to help us build these API endpoints and lambda functions amongst other services and features that we want to use to help build our application to make it a lot easier so we don't have to manually configure things within the AWS console constantly.

It also gives us a way to build applications in a reproducible, portable way that we can share with other developers on our team. Potentially we can even save these configurations onto places like GitHub to share with the world and just makes things a lot more flexible for us to handle. So with that, if you do want to find more information, you can go to serverless.com which is the homepage of the Serverless Framework.

What we want to do though is we want to get started with actually building some services in the Serverless Framework and for that we need to make sure we have node installed on our local machines. So if you go to nodejs.org and If you don't have node installed already, you can just click the downloads link on nodejs.org and make sure that you install what's required for your system here. Otherwise we basically just need node 10 as a minimum so that's an easy minimum to remember. So as long as you have node 10 installed on your local machine, then we should be fine to continue.

So at this point we want to go ahead and install the Serverless Framework. And if you see the documentation here for the Serverless Framework, it's as easy as installing a node module globally. NPM install -g, serverless. So let's go ahead and do that right now. So now we want to install the Serverless Framework globally and I'm going to do this by typing in NPM install -g serverless. In my case with my system, I need to also sudo in front of it because it is installed in protected directories. For a lot of users, using sudo will not be necessary, but this just press enter and continue the installation.

Once completed, you should see some instruction on how to get started with your first serverless project, which we will do in the next video. But let's just take a look at some of the commands. If I just use serverless --help. Here we can see some of the commands available to us as part of the Serverless Framework and we will be using a lot of these, but some to consider is the deploy function here, which allows us to deploy our configured services into our AWS account and other ones like create, which lets us create a brand new serverless service. But in the next video we'll be doing exactly that. So let's continue.