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

Local development and testing


One challenge we face as serverless engineers is that of convenience. To be more specific, it's a swift process writing code, deploying it, and beginning testing. Testing a live system will often result in some code or configuration issue, but it is quickly fixed and redeployed. The problem we face, therefore, is that it's so easy to fix issues and then redeploy that we can get into the habit of skipping testing or not running our stack locally.

Local development

One question I answer with some regularity is, How do I run this locally? When writing a server-based application, one of the first tasks to undertake is getting the system set up so that it can be run during development. When building a serverless-based application, however, there really is no server to run. So, how do we develop our application?

The truthful answer is that this is a challenge, and one that has not been solved perfectly yet; to be fair, this issue is difficult with any microservice-based...