You need an automated, low-effort, reliable way to deploy AWS Lambda functions and their supporting infrastructure for a new serverless application. Which approach provides the least operational overhead?

AWS SAM is a framework specifically designed for building serverless applications, providing a simplified way to define Lambda functions, APIs, databases, and other AWS resources using a concise syntax. Integrating SAM with a CI/CD pipeline and the SAM CLI automates the packaging, deployment, and update processes, significantly reducing operational overhead compared to manual methods. This approach leverages infrastructure as code, ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments. Shell scripts for manual uploads or AWS CLI deployments, while functional, require more custom scripting and maintenance for managing dependencies, packaging, and deployments, increasing operational burden. Building container images for Lambda is a valid approach for certain use cases (e.g., larger dependencies, custom runtimes) but generally introduces more complexity and overhead than SAM for typical serverless applications. AWS CodeArtifact is for package management, not container image storage; ECR is used for container images.