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 3. A Three-Tier Web Application Pattern with GraphQL

In Chapter 2, A Three-Tier Web Application Using REST,  we walked through the entire process of authoring a REST API on top of a serverless system with accompanying hosted services for the data and presentation layers. Our serverless logic layer was implemented with AWS Lambda and API Gateway, which provide many advantages regarding deployment, iteration speed, and scalability. REST APIs are well understood among the web development community and a safe choice when building a new web-based API. However, emerging tools and protocols are taking shape and providing us with alternatives to REST. GraphQL is arguably one of the most popular alternatives to REST APIs lately, evidenced by AWS and other platforms releasing hosted GraphQL services. You don't need to look very deep to find the uptick in GraphQL's popularity. 

In this chapter, we'll walk through the process of updating the three-tier example API to use a GraphQL interface rather...