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

Securing sensitive configuration


Throughout this book, and in the previous section about managing environments, we've relied heavily on environment variables. One very nice feature of pulling a configuration from the environment is that sensitive information never needs to be checked into the source control. All of our application code and any framework code (such as the Serverless Framework) can look up variable values from the environment when needed.

Configuration via environment variables is all well and good, but our usage of these variables is not perfect. The problem with our usage of environment variables and Lambda is that the data pulled from the deployment environment is uploaded and stored in AWS Lambda functions as plain text. For example, take a look at serverless.yml from the previous section about error handling using either Sentry or Rollbar:

provider:
  name: aws 
  runtime: python3.6
  region: ${env:AWS_REGION}
  state: ${env:$ENV}
  environment:
    SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT:...