Book Image

Serverless Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Brian Zambrano
Book Image

Serverless Design Patterns and Best Practices

By: Brian Zambrano

Overview of this book

Serverless applications handle many problems that developers face when running systems and servers. The serverless pay-per-invocation model can also result in drastic cost savings, contributing to its popularity. While it's simple to create a basic serverless application, it's critical to structure your software correctly to ensure it continues to succeed as it grows. Serverless Design Patterns and Best Practices presents patterns that can be adapted to run in a serverless environment. You will learn how to develop applications that are scalable, fault tolerant, and well-tested. The book begins with an introduction to the different design pattern categories available for serverless applications. You will learn thetrade-offs between GraphQL and REST and how they fare regarding overall application design in a serverless ecosystem. The book will also show you how to migrate an existing API to a serverless backend using AWS API Gateway. You will learn how to build event-driven applications using queuing and streaming systems, such as AWS Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and AWS Kinesis. Patterns for data-intensive serverless application are also explained, including the lambda architecture and MapReduce. This book will equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to develop scalable and resilient serverless applications confidently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Trimming AWS Lambda versions


This last tip is specific to AWS Lambda. You may have noticed in other chapters that there are the following lines in the serverless.yml file:

plugins:
  - serverless-prune-plugin

By default, each time you deploy a new version of an AWS Lambda function, AWS will help out by keeping the old version around. In a development system where you may be deploying dozens of times a day, this can become quite wasteful and, as cheap as storage is, it's not unlimited. Also, in the case of a production system that has a lifetime of years, the cost of all the old versions can add up.

If you're using the Serverless Framework, there is an easy way around this. If you're not using the Serverless Framework, however, it would be no more than a day's work to write a small script to do this for you. The serverless-prune-plugin will keep only a certain number of Lambda versions for you and delete the rest. The number of versions to keep is configurable and trimming happens whenever you...