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

Setting up static assets


Setting up an S3 bucket and CloudFront distribution to host static media isn't complicated and, in theory, we could add this to the Resources section of our serverless.yml file. The ability of Serverless to manage so many resources via CloudFormation is a slippery slope, since setting up systems can quickly become an exercise in learning and debugging CloudFormation. Another downside of a growing Resources section in the serverless.yml file is that deployments will take longer and longer. It's possible to only deploy application code during development, which results in single-digit second deployments; but when some system resource is updated, including environment variables, the entire CloudFormation stack needs to updated.

Rather than creating the S3 bucket and CloudFront distribution via serverless.yml, we can use a separate CloudFormation template designed just for this purpose. Another reason for splitting this out into a separate step is that this layer rarely...