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

Cold starts


One commonality between most, if not all, FaaS providers is the issue of cold starts. Cold starts are defined as the behavior where an invocation of a cloud function which has not been executed in a while takes a considerable amount of time to initialize before fulfilling the request. If you have used Docker, for example, you'll know that creating a new container from an existing image takes slightly longer than starting up a container you have previously run. This Docker container behavior is analogous to the way cloud functions, whether it be AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, or Azure Cloud Functions, behave. If you do any searching around the internet for serverless cold starts, you'll find several blog posts and documentation on the matter.

There isn't a silver bullet for bypassing the cold start issue. However, there are several things to be aware of so that you can minimize their impact on your application.

Keeping cloud functions warm

There are several tips and tricks you...