Book Image

Building Serverless Applications with Python

Book Image

Building Serverless Applications with Python

Overview of this book

Serverless architectures allow you to build and run applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. Many companies have adopted this architecture to save cost and improve scalability. This book will help you design serverless architectures for your applications with AWS and Python. The book is divided into three modules. The first module explains the fundamentals of serverless architecture and how AWS lambda functions work. In the next module, you will learn to build, release, and deploy your application to production. You will also learn to log and test your application. In the third module, we will take you through advanced topics such as building a serverless API for your application. You will also learn to troubleshoot and monitor your app and master AWS lambda programming concepts with API references. Moving on, you will also learn how to scale up serverless applications and handle distributed serverless systems in production. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the knowledge required to build scalable and cost-efficient Python applications with a serverless framework.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Functions as containers

For understanding the concept of functions being executed as/inside containers, we need to properly understand the concept of containers. To cite the definition of a container from the Docker documentation (https://www.docker.com/what-docker):

A container image is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings.

What is available for both Linux and Windows based applications; containerized software will always run the same, regardless of the environment.

Containers isolate software from its surroundings (for example, differences between development and staging environments) and help reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure.

So, the concept of containers is that they are self-sustainable isolated...