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

AWS API Gateway introduction


API Gateway from Amazon Web Services is a fantastic tool with a slew of features that significantly simplifies implementation of an API proxy pattern. Later on in the chapter, we'll discuss strategies when building on a different cloud provider; however, if you're like me and use AWS consistently, API Gateway can make your life much more comfortable. Personally, I feel that it's an underrated tool, which can do a lot more than HTTP requests to Lambda functions as we saw in Chapter 2, Three-Tier Web Application Using REST and Chapter 3, Three-Tier Web Application Pattern with GraphQL.

The first question may be, What is API Gateway and what does it do? Rather than answer this myself, I'll defer to the technical documentation at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/welcome.html, which does a good job of describing Gateway at a high level:

"Amazon API Gateway is an AWS service that enables developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and...