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

Complex integration using a Lambda function


Our prior example is a best-case scenario. Because our new backend system included all of the data we needed to support our legacy API, our jobs were pretty easy. However, what happens in cases where the legacy API you need to support does not have a one-to-one mapping with a newer API? Of course, if you control the new API it's possible to implement any missing functionality. While that may be possible, it may not be a good idea since you may be reimplementing imperfect design in your new and clean RESTful API in order to support a legacy system.

In this case, rather than dirtying the new API, it's possible to use a Lambda function as the Integration Type, rather than an HTTP endpoint. With this pattern, the Lambda function may act with some intelligence and perform any type of task that is needed. For example, imagine another legacy endpoint of https://$HOSTNAME/get_posts_with_users that returns a list of posts with the user records embedded in...