Modern serverless platforms demand fast startup times, low resource overhead, and efficient concurrency. Kotlin, with its modern syntax and coroutine-based concurrency, and Ktor, its lightweight asynchronous web framework, provide an ideal combination for building high-performance serverless APIs. This guide demonstrates how to build a Product Catalog CRUD API using Kotlin and Ktor, structure a coroutine-driven application, handle concurrent requests efficiently, and package it for deployment across cloud providers in fully serverless or containerized environments. By the end, you'll have a working CRUD API, hardened for external calls, packaged as a portable JAR ready for serverless or container deployment.

Prerequisites

Before you begin:

Have access to an Ubuntu 24.04 based server as a non-root user with sudo privileges.

Install JDK 17+ (OpenJDK recommended).

Use the project's Gradle wrapper ( ./gradlew ). Installing Gradle system-wide is optional.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

1.…