I'd like to choose a framework for building and deploying AWS services and I need to have a full list of pros/cons to justify one framework over the other. Since this forum doesn't want people to just post opinions please provide references with your responses. Also, I'd like to hear from people who have deployed production solutions using any of these frameworks.
If you are looking at building Serverless applications I would select the Serverless Framework. For a couple very large reasons:
The community is a lot bigger. This may not seem like a big deal but with the community contributions constantly improving the framework itself as well as the huge quantity of community plugins to the core framework that extends the functionality out to an enormous amount, it makes it difficult to justify anything else.
Documentation quality is amazing. The Serverless Framework has a huge depth of documentation, everything from reference docs for every feature of the framework to full (and free) courses about building Serverless applications and blog posts with details on best practices. Then there is the examples repos, guides, tutorials ... its pretty awesome!
The ability to use and mix multiple cloud vendors. SAM is AWS exclusive,so if you wanted to potentially create services in other cloud vendors such as Azure or GCP, you would be stuck. But its not just the big boys either; Twilio, IBM Cloud, Cloudflare, Tencent, OpenWhisk and more are all supported.
Free monitoring and management platform. The team at Serverless Inc also produce a pretty stellar SaaS platform at dashboard.serverless.com that provides a lot of the "missing" capabilities needed for application development such as monitoring, debugging, troubleshooting, CI/CD and a bunch more!
Components makes deploying specific use cases a piece of cake. Components is one of the newest projects to come out of Serverless, Inc and promises a shift in how we build Serverless applications that is far more use case driven but also focusses a lot more on the developer experience. Something to definitely keep your eye on.
So yes, I would suggest the Serverless Framework for a lot of really compelling reasons!