Serverless Beyond the Buzzword

Know how Serverless and cloud-native systems work, their benefits and roles in automating and optimizing organizations, and the challenges to be considered. Anyone interested in Serverless architecture will benefit from this book, regardless of their level of technical understanding.

This revised and expanded new edition explains many related terms, such as microservices, cloud-native, architecture, several relevant AWS services, and how it all works together to produce cost-effective, scalable solutions in the cloud. The book starts at a high level and gradually gets more in-depth and technical.

The less technical decision maker will learn how Serverless can affect finance, security, people, and compliance. The book touches on important decisions, such as selecting and working with external or internal specialists and teams; finding, evaluating, and training them; and the flexibility and dynamics available within digital projects.

Deployment automation and DevOps also feature heavily in this book, and you will find real-world use cases and examples of Serverless architecture to get you started. It's worth noting that this book is not a development guide; it gives you a comprehensive understanding of what Serverless is so you can make informed decisions for your organization and projects.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

* Understand Serverless architecture and strategy
* Understand modern cloud management strategy, governance, and organizational team structure
* Handle budget planning and management
* Get started with Serverless architecture design
* Gain knowledge of best practices and security, as well as data management and DevOps
* Study proactive logging, operations, architecture examples, case studies, and more

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

Anyone interested in a deep understanding of Serverless and how it can impact organizations and projects, regardless of their technical level. Strategic insights are provided for entrepreneurs and executives, planning and team insights for project managers, and technical insights for architects and team leads. Cloud consultants working with enterprises can read everything for a full, in-depth understanding of the topic. Other readers, such as less technical CTOs/CIOs, VPs, entrepreneurs, product owners, project managers, etc., can get what they need from the first 5-7 chapters. More technical readers and those experienced with Serverless can skim through the first 3 chapters and start with the security deep dive in Chapter 4.

Thomas Smart has been actively involved with digital projects since 2002. His experience crosses many industries and types and sizes of organisations, giving him a wealth of experience and knowledge to draw upon as part of his consulting services. Since 2020 he has worked as a senior consultant for Sourced Singapore, helping large, regulated enterprises evolve their cloud strategy to productively deliver Serverless applications. This experience has provided many new insights for large enterprises and their unique challenges when adopting modern cloud strategies. About the author

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Who is this book for?

Technical levels used in this book

What will you learn?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Second edition

Chapter 1: Serverless basics

What is Serverless architecture?

Microservices

Serverless example

History of Serverless

Types of projects

Key challenges

Key benefits

Common objections

Public case studies

Chapter 2: Strategy

Introduction

Traditional organization structure vs Serverless

Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE)

Cloud controls as compliance guardrails

Supporting tools

Serverless adoption: current state

Serverless adoption: desired state

Serverless adoption: gap analysis

Application suitability for Serverless

Event Storming

Public case studies

Chapter 3: Finances

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

The value of paying for utilization

The cost to develop Serverless

The cost of migrating applications

The cost of maintenance and operations

Estimating the cloud operational costs

Collecting the input data for an estimate

Calculating the estimate

Cost management

Cost optimization

Chapter 4: Security

Shared responsibility

Serverless security

Principle of Least Privilege

IAM Policy tips

Security for cloud users

Security for microservices

User input validation

Storing credentials

Encryption

Protecting Data

Securing Databases

Privacy and GDPR

Security monitoring with ElectricEye

Chapter 5: People

Serverless roles

Serverless roles: Solution Architect

Serverless Roles: Cloud Security Engineer

Serverless Roles: Deployment Automation Engineer

Serverless roles: Full Stack Developer

Serverless roles: Database Engineer

Serverless training

Serverless team structure

Working with Serverless vendors

Vetting Serverless capabilities

Chapter 6: DevOps & Tooling

What is DevOps?

Infrastructure as Code

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation planning

Terraform

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)

AWS Amplify

AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

CDK technical considerations

Serverless Framework

Code Repositories

GIT Submodules

Developer Tooling

Code quality assurance

Chapter 7: Data

Data is a valuable asset

Database selection

Event Sourcing

Data tenancy

Relational Database Service (RDS)

Redshift Serverless

DynamoDB

NoSQL

Serverless NoSQL databases

Managed NoSQL databases

NoSQL databases comparison

In-memory databases

AppSync

Simple Storage Solution (S3)

Elastic File System (EFS)

Chapter 8: Logging & Testing

Logging

Reactive Logging

Proactive Logging

Logging format and content

Log types in the cloud

Cloud logging services

CloudWatch

Exporting logs to S3

CloudWatch Subscriptions

Managed services for proactive logging

Error Monitoring

Performance Optimisation

Cost Tracking

Security Monitoring

Logging Best Practices

Testing

Testing Challenges in Serverless

Types of Tests

Asynchronous Testing

Risk Assessment for Testing

Test Pyramid vs Test Honeycomb

Contract Testing for Serverless

Deployment Pipeline

AWS Testing Services

Chapter 9: Architecture

Challenges & mitigations

AWS: Microservices

AWS: Application Programming Interface (API)

Design patterns

Microservice example architectures

Stateless architecture

Decoupling microservices

AWS: Decoupling

Event-driven architecture

Asynchronous design pattern

Containers

AWS: Edge

AWS: Internet of Things (IoT)

AWS: Managed Machine Learning (ML)

AWS: Ledger Technology

AWS: Call Centre

Well-Architected Framework

Serverless tips

Chapter 10: Case studies

Introduction

Proactive logging

Serverless data lake

Video analysis

Serverless Minecraft

Dynamic live streaming

SEO-friendly website and CMS

Virtual host

True Serverless containers

Epilogue

References