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

Logic layer


Application code is likely the area of most interest and the layer that has the most changes from a traditional web application hosted on a managed server, so let's start with that.

Application code and function layout

Let's differentiate two classifications of our organization for the logical layer:

  • Organization of the Lambda functions themselves, within AWS
  • Organization of the application code

Lambda functions are the unit of work in Lambda and other FaaS providers (for simplicity and clarity, I will refer to these as Lambda functions from here on out). A single Lambda function may be updated or deployed in isolation without affecting other Lambda functions.

Organization of the Lambda functions

With a REST API, there are a few options you have as to how each API endpoint maps to a function. The primary options in this design are whether to have a single Lambda function handle a single HTTP verb/resource combination, or whether to have a single lambda function handle all HTTP verbs...