Serverless

If you’ve read the blog posts on CloudJourney.io before, you’ve likely read the term “Continuous Verification”. If you haven’t that’s okay too. There’s an amazing article from Dan Illson and Bill Shetti on The New Stack explaining in detail what Continuous Verification is. To make sure we’re all on the same page, though, I’ll quickly go over it as well. As a definition, Continuous Verification is “A process of querying external system(s) and using information from the response to make decision(s) to improve the development and deployment process.”.

The article I wrote with Bill Shetti on Tracking Distributed Errors in Serverless Apps is now available on DZone too 🙌 In this article, we demonstrate how to use Sentry.io to better monitor errors in serverless applications and save you some time while debugging your apps running on AWS Lambda.

Microservices give us as developers an incredible amount of freedom. We can choose our language and we can decide where and when to deploy our service. One of the biggest challenges with microservices, though, is figuring out how things go wrong. With microservices, we can build large, distributed applications, but that also means finding what goes wrong is challenging. It’s even harder to trace errors when you use a platform like AWS Lambda.

At VMware we define Continuous Verification as:

“A process of querying external systems and using information from the response to make decisions to improve the development and deployment process.”

At Serverless Nashville, I got a chance to not only talk about what that means for serverless apps but also how we use serverless in some of the business units at VMware.

I’ve looked at Pulumi to do a bunch of things, including creating subnets in a VPC, building EKS clusters, and DynamoDB tables. The one thing I hadn’t explored yet was how to deploy AWS Lambda functions using Pulumi, so that’s exactly what this blog is about.

As a developer, I’ve built apps and wrote code. As a cheesecake connoisseur, I’ve tried many different kinds of cheesecake. After I got to talk to some of the bakers, I realized that building apps and baking cheesecake have a lot in common. It all starts with knowing and trusting your ingredients. According to Tidelift, over 90 percent of applications contain some open source packages. Developers choose open source because they believe it’s better, more flexible, and more extendible.

Using serverless requires us to change our mindset on how we build apps and requires us to unlearn things we learned building apps in the past. At AWS re:Invent I got a chance to do a VMware Code session and talk about how we took part of our ACME Fitness Shop and transformed it into serverless functions with AWS Lambda.

As a trend cloud vendors tend to use the word serverless quite loosely. While serverless comes in a lot of shapes and sizes and as long as the characteristics fit within the four categories from my last blog, it is a serverless service. To make sure that we’re all on the same page, I’ll use the following definition for serverless:

“Serverless is a development model where developers focus on a single unit of work and can deploy to a platform that automatically scales, without developer intervention.”

In this blog post, we’ll look at how that model works on AWS Fargate, which allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.

There are many predictions from market analyst firms on the size of the global serverless architecture market and how fast it will grow. The numbers range from $18B to $21.99B in the next few years with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the double digits. But is serverless only a fancy name for products like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions?

The CTO of a company I have worked for used to say that services should be loosely coupled but tightly integrated. I didn’t realize until a lot later how true that statement is as you’re building out microservices. How those microservices communicate with each other has also changed quite a bit. More often than not, they send messages using asynchronous protocols. As an industry, we decided that this new way of building apps should be called “Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).”