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

Managing different environments


With most production-level applications, teams maintain multiple environments for different purposes. A QA environment may exist for the QA team to run automated tests, a staging environment may exist for the DevOps team to tests their infrastructure changes, and the production environment exists to serve live traffic. Very often, building and maintaining these different environments can be a full-time job.

With serverless systems, I've found that maintaining different environments can be much more straightforward. Some of this may come from the fact that, by their nature, serverless applications are inherently smaller. Writing a monolithic application in a serverless architecture isn't wise - or even natural. How best, then, can we manage and maintain different environments for serverless systems?

For this, turning to tenant III of the 12-Factor App Methodology helps. This tenant can be found at https://12factor.net/config and states:

Store config in the environment...