This article is primarily for staff and student employees, but may be helpful for those interested in learning more about web and cloud application development.
Building on a Common Foundation
AWS cloud development at St. Thomas is grounded in a shared set of tools, practices, and architectural principles that ensure projects are consistent, secure, and easy to maintain. When everyone starts with the same core workflows, such as Git-based version control and established deployment pipelines, we can collaborate more effectively and support applications throughout their lifecycle. These standards allow developers to focus on solving business problems rather than wrestling with inconsistent environments or reinventing foundational infrastructure for each new project.
Serverless First, Resources Over Code
Our approach to cloud development favors serverless services over traditional servers. Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Step Functions, and other managed offerings reduce operational overhead, minimize cost, and eliminate the maintenance burden of long-running servers and custom compute environments. By building solutions around AWS-managed resources rather than custom code, developers reduce security risks, simplify scaling, and increase reliability. This approach also supports microservice architectures, allowing us to create small, independent, event-driven components that can evolve without impacting the entire system.
However, it must also be noted that although we strive to be "serverless first," we are not "serverless only." Several current and potential workloads do not fit within a serverless architecture and will not receive its benefits. EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk are still the preferred options for some workloads.
Pipelines, GitOps, and Automated Deployment
Automated deployments are essential to sustainable cloud development. GitOps practices, combined with AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and SAM, create a predictable and repeatable path from development to production. When deployments happen through automated pipelines rather than manual steps, projects become easier to audit, easier to troubleshoot, and significantly more secure. Using a shared pipeline model also ensures that all applications benefit from the same quality controls, monitoring integrations, tagging policies, and resource protections maintained by the Enterprise Application and Cloud Development team.
Starter Templates and Supported Patterns
To help developers get started with confidence, we provide ready-to-use CloudFormation templates, sample code, and architectural patterns for common workloads, including APIs, file processing, scheduled tasks, and web hosting. These templates follow St. Thomas best practices for tagging, least privilege IAM roles, monitoring with CloudWatch and X-Ray, and resource organization. Building on these standardized patterns makes it easier to implement secure, scalable services without needing deep expertise in every AWS component. It also ensures that your project can be supported long after the original creator moves on, since it aligns with the tools, structures, and operational processes used across ITS. The more developers adopt these shared foundations, the easier it becomes for us to provide guidance, troubleshoot issues, and partner on long-term application success.
Learn More
The Developer and Cloud Tools service page provides an exhaustive list of developer tools to help you get started. As you explore and discover opportunities to innovate within your area, feel free to reach out with any questions you may have using the Developer and Cloud Tools Request Service form.