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

Transforming responses from a modern API


Next, we'll walk through a scenario where we have an existing API interface that we need to support, but would like to change the backend implementation entirely. This scenario is common and one I've dealt with personally. Existing clients point to a particular set of API endpoints. Breaking a public API that many developers depend on isn't something anyone wants to do. But, when that API is built on top of hard-to-maintain or poorly performing code, how does one iterate without requiring hundreds or thousands of developers to update their mobile, web, or GUI applications?

In this example, I will walk through the steps necessary to take a pretend legacy API and reimplement it using our modern API. JSONPlaceholder will play the part of our new, modern, scalable, and performant RESTful API. The single URL we will reimplement with the proxy pattern is https://$HOSTNAME/get_comments_by_post_id.

You can imagine the type of data this endpoint returns. Thinking...