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

MapReduce serverless architecture


MapReduce on a serverless platform is very different than in a system such as Hadoop. Most of the differences occur on the operational and system architecture side of things. Another huge difference is the limited processing power and memory we have with our FaaS. Because FaaS providers put in hard limits for both temporary storage space and memory, there are some problems that you cannot realistically solve with a serverless MapReduce implementation.

The good news is that the foundational ideas in the MapReduce design still hold true. If you look back up at the start of the initial list of benefits provided by MapReduce, we naturally get many of these for free, albeit with a few caveats. MapReduce truly shines, due in large part to the parallelization of computation. We have that with serverless functions. Similarly, much work goes into ensuring Hadoop nodes are healthy and able to perform work. Again, we get that for free with serverless functions.

A significant...