Introduction

The mention of serverless computing and cloud computing go together. Instead of following the traditional infrastructure approach, now people are more inclined towards a business-centric approach. The latter approach is favourable because it helps in concentrating on the business problems rather than wasting your time and energy on the server management complexities. This article will cover the following points in detail.

• Importance of serverless thinking
• Describing the process of identifying a particular business problem
• Getting familiar with the core functionalities
• Mapping the functionalities to the serverless solutions

What is Serverless Computing?

Server-less computing, as the name suggests , is a type of computer model which eradicates the need of servers in an organisation. So how does it work? Well, the main role here is of the cloud providers. They handle all the infrastructure-related tasks which help the developers to focus on writing the code alone.

Advantages of Server less computing

There are many advantages of server-less computing, some of them are mentioned below.

• Agility
• Salability
• Cost-efficient
• Speed
• Accuracy

Shifting to Serverless Mindsets

If you really want to take the full advantage of serverless computing then the first thing that you need to do is shift your mindsets to serverless computing. This is pretty simple to follow, as a developer your task will be only to focus on the coding part instead of underlying infrastructure. Having a serverless mindset is vital to take full advantage of serverless architecture effectively.

Identifying the Business Problem

Identifying the business problem is the very first step while adopting the serverless solution. For the identification, there should be a well-defined collaboration between the technical team and business stakeholders. This approach will help in gathering a comprehensive understanding of the problems faced.

Understanding Core Functionality and Requirements

After you have successfully identified the business problem, now is the time to get yourself familiar with the core functionality. This step mostly includes problem-solving stuff like which processes and features will be required for solving the identified problem. But one thing which is important is your business logic understanding and its related outcome.

Determining What Can Be Automated Using Events

If you want certain actions to take place within the system then a serverless architecture is a great pick to handle such events. There are certain business problem aspects that can be automated by the assistance of events. Of course, it is a crucial task but not an impossible one. You need to identify and pinpoint the trigger points that can be linked to specific events.

Mapping the Problem to Serverless Architecture

Now comes the mapping process. You need to map the business problem to serverless architecture. For this you will be needing event sources, data sources and event handlers as they are considered the serverless components.

Event Sources like APIs, IoT, Mobile, etc.

The specialty of serverless architecture is that they are event-driven. Obviously there have to be some sources which can act as a triggering point for various events. Following things can act as event sources:

• APIs
• IoT Devices
• Mobile Applications
• External Systems

Serverless functions are triggered as soon as an event is initiated from these sources.

Event Handlers Using Lambda

The basic purpose of event handlers is to execute some code against the response of a particular event. Due to this, organizations are able to provide a dynamic response to the on-going changes in their environment. Following services can act as event handlers.

• AWS Lambda
• Azure Functions
• Google Cloud Functions

Data Sources like DynamoDB, S3, etc.

There has to be some kind of storage even for the serverless applications. Well, for this you can use DynamoDB, S3 and Amazon’s NoSQL database service. They serve the role of data sources in a serverless architecture. The advantages include:

• Seamless data storage integration
• Minimal management overhead

Development and Testing Process

Developing Functions Locally Using CLI

The real development begins when the business problem gets identified successfully and decomposed into smaller functions. Developers can use a serverless framework to build and test functions locally using CLI. This provides great ease as users can perform all the function related tasks such as creating, modifying and testing them locally before actually deploying them to the cloud environment.

Some serverless frameworks are:

• AWS SAM
• Serverless Framework
• Azure Functions

Testing and Debugging Functions

Each function in a serverless application is supposed to interact with various cloud services. A detailed testing is required to ensure the correct working of these functions. Developers do two types of testing; unit testing (for accessing the functionality of individual functions) and integration testing (for evaluating the functions’ interaction). Automated testing tools and frameworks are designed to identify bugs in the early stages in serverless applications.

How to debug serverless functions?

The serverless functions are distributed in nature due to which debugging them becomes a challenging task. Cloud platforms provide various monitoring and logging tools to track functions’ execution and identify related issues. Moreover, there are local debugging tools available which are integrated into the serverless frameworks. They assist developers in troubleshooting the code before deployment.

Deploying and Monitoring Applications

After successfully developing, testing and debugging the functions locally, now you need to deploy them to the cloud environment. Scalability is another great feature offered by the serverless platforms. Automatic scaling eradicates the need for manual intervention. A better approach is to deploy the functions either using the CLI method or an integrated development tool.

Deployment is followed by monitoring. It is really important to track or monitor the performance of the functions after their deployment. Various notifications and alerts are used by the developers to know about a possible bug or issue.

Managing Serverless Applications

To manage a serverless application you need to consider the following aspects:

Logging and Monitoring

To aggregate logs from the functions you need to use centralized logging solutions by using services such as ELK stack or AWS CloudWatch Logs. Similarly, to track the performance rate of functions use the Azure Monitor or Google Cloud Monitoring services.

Automating Deployments

For automating the deployment you can use the CI/CD strategy (Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery). Tools like AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins and GitHub Actions can be used for this.

Security Best Practices

Proper authentication and authorization is very important. Adjust the privileges in such a way that only the authorized users have the permission to access the resources and invoke functions. Along with this perform a regular code review to have command on your coding practice. Make sure to restrict the inbound as well as outbound traffic.

Advantages of a Serverless Architecture – Wrap up

• Scaling the Application and Functions: There is no need to handle the scaling manually in a serverless environment as it comes platform-inherited. As the demand increases, so do the resources. Similarly, in case of functions additional function instances are created depending upon the number of requests made.
• Scaling Data Sources: Data sources are responsible for determining the overall scalability in a serverless architecture. That is why the businesses should go for serverless data storage solutions such as cloud-based databases, Azure Cosmos DB and Amazon DynamoDB.
• Handling Spikes in Traffic: Sometimes there are peak times when the request load is more than expected. To address this issue features like asynchronous processing and queuing can be used efficiently to handle the traffic spikes.

Top Tech Case Studies

You can refer to the case studies here ,which shows the progress of big tech companies, and even small tech startups improved and boosted their businesses with help of optimized serverless solutions.

Conclusion

All in all, there are only advantages when it comes to adopting server-less solutions. We have explained even the tiniest details which were relevant to server less computing. It is time to leave behind the traditional approach and choose the server less solutions. It will increase your productivity as well as allow you to focus on the important part i.e. code and data solutions. SUDO Consultants being top AWS Solution providers in Dubai, will help you achieve this roadmap..