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

Chapter 2. A Three-Tier Web Application Using REST

It should be safe to say that the vast majority of developers know what REST is. A three-tier web application consists of the following:

  • Presentation layer (HTML and CSS)
  • Business logic layer (application code)
  • Data layer (Relational Database Management System or another type of data store)

The three-tier web application is extremely well known and one of the most common designs on the web today. Readers are likely familiar with this design when thinking about a web application's static content (that is, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) which are served from a content delivery network (CDN), which talks to a RESTful API hosted on a web server, which, in turn, talks to a database.

In this chapter, we will go through the process of building a three-tier web application using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for our presentation layer, a REST API for our business logic, and a Postgres database for our data tier. Most importantly, and keeping in line with this...