The world encountered the biggest global breach of all time. Around 8.5 million computers across the world were disabled due to the IT outage in Microsoft. This massive breach happened because CrowdStrike sent out a corrupted software update to its huge base of customers leading to Windows’s “Blue Screen of Death”.
Nowadays, even the biggest giants like Microsoft are prone to attacks & update problems. Everyone saw its cascading effect of loss in all industries. Therefore, it’s not just a preference but a necessity to build agile systems in this era.
What do you mean by Agility?
Agility means your systems can quickly adapt to the changing demands, deliver new features, and instantly detect and resolve issues reducing the impact of potential risks or cyber-attacks.
For this, serverless architecture has emerged as a super trendy approach adopted by many popular companies like Netflix, GoDaddy, and more to achieve agile, scalable, and cost-effective solutions.
In this blog, you’ll explore 10 best practices for rapid prototyping & experimentation in serverless architecture that can enhance agility in your systems, making them more future-ready and resilient.
But before that, let’s understand how serverless architecture sows the seed of agility in your systems through its key features.
Key Aspects of Agility Through Serverless Architecture
Agility through serverless architecture means you’ll get systems with increased flexibility, speed, and adaptability to develop & deploy applications through serverless architecture. Here’s a detailed explanation:
1. Rapid Development and Deployment:
- Focus on Code, Not Infrastructure: With all responsibilities shifted to cloud providers for server management & provisioning, developers concentrate only on writing code without worrying about underlying infrastructure management, leading to faster development cycles.
- Automatic Scaling: You can automatically scale resources based on changing demand with the help of serverless architecture. This removes the requirement for manual efforts allowing faster deployment of features.
2. Reduced Time to Market:
Event-Driven Execution: It is one of the popular aspects of serverless architecture that has attracted many large-scale companies for its adoption. The event-driven architecture for innovation triggers functions by events, enabling immediate execution and reducing latency in deploying new features or updates.
Pre-Built Services: Serverless offerings from famous cloud providers like AWS Lambda provide already integrated services and APIs that help a lot in the development process.
3. Cost Efficiency and Resource Optimization:
Pay-Per-Use Model: Serverless systems charge for resources, only when functions are executed, which means their costs are based on actual usage eliminating idle server costing. This model supports agile development by minimizing waste and optimizing resource allocation.
No Idle Resources: As stated, serverless architecture avoids costs associated with idle infrastructure, because resources are provisioned dynamically in response to events.
4. Simplified Operations and Maintenance:
Managed Services: Since the infrastructure maintenance, security patches, and updates, are handled by cloud providers, the development teams can deliver quality & innovative services.
Built-In Resilience: Serverless platforms have their inherent fault tolerance and high availability that simplifies operational complexity.
5. Improved Scalability:
Seamless Scaling: Serverless applications easily manage varying loads. Even if your system experiences scaling up during peak times and scaling down during off-peak times, you can effortlessly handle it without manual intervention.
Global Reach: Serverless functions can be deployed globally, which means you can easily deliver low-latency responses to users worldwide in cases of rapid prototyping & experimenting with new features.
Best practices for rapid prototyping & experimentation in serverless
With agility upholding massive significance in the tech world, your businesses must be capable enough to check on new features quickly with proper feedback for deploying a resilient system that can withstand the storms of cyberattacks & constant updates.
Here’s a list of 10 best practices for rapid prototyping & experimentation in serverless architecture that can make your systems agile & secure:
1. Precise problem statement
It’s apparent to define the problem before you decide to solve it. Cause only a well-defined problem statement will be able to stage for effective prototyping. Doesn’t matter which phase of development you are in, you should take utmost time and define your problem statement that serverless architecture can solve.
For example, the problem statement for building a recommendation engine for a healthcare firm will be “Develop a serverless recommendation engine that suggests personalized healthcare treatments, medications, or preventive care plans to patients based on their medical history, symptoms, lifestyle, and other relevant factors.”
2. Utilising managed services
Serverless platforms provided by various cloud providers such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions, already offer cloud-managed services for computing, storage, and event-driven execution. Therefore instead of building an infrastructure from scratch, utilize these services to focus on your application logic.
For example:
- You can use AWS S3 for storing static assets like images etc.
- For NoSQL data storage you can use AWS DynamoDB or Azure Cosmos DB.
- For triggering serverless functions AWS API Gateway or Azure Functions HTTP triggers can be easily utilized.
3. Event-driven architecture design
Since all serverless applications flourish on events. Therefore, make sure you design your prototypes around event-driven patterns.
For example:
- To process the SQS queue messages use AWS Lambda.
- In case of uploading an object to the S3 bucket, trigger a function.
- Utilise API Gateway for responding to HTTP requests.
4. Use stateless functions
Serverless functions are stateless by design. Therefore, make sure you don’t store session data or maintain a state within a function. Instead, utilize external services like AWS ElastiCache for storing, caching, or maintaining a shared state.
5. Cold starts minimization
Cold starts is the situation when the function is invoked after being idle. One can reduce cold start latency in serverless architecture by:
- Exploiting provisioned concurrency that can sustain a pool of warm instances.
- Reducing package size as smaller deployment packages load faster.
- Taking a runtime with faster startup times (e.g., Node.js or Go).
6. Security practices
To keep your serverless functions secure, provide minimum & only necessary permissions to your serverless functions.
- Utilise Cloud provider security tools like AWS Secrets Manager or Azure Key Vault for storing sensitive information like API keys, and database credentials.
- Validate input data to keep your functions safe from injection attacks.
7. Monitoring and debugging
Prototypes are made to check for errors or discrepancies. Hence instrument your prototypes with proper alerts for error rates, latency spikes, and resource utilization. Make use of cloud provider tools like AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud Logging.
For debugging follow:
- Examining function logs.
- Distributed tracing tools usage.
- Events locally for testing simulation.
8. Cost Optimization
Serverless architecture indeed saves you from idle resource costs. But, for functions make sure to choose appropriate memory and CPU settings. And if you own a predictable workload then, reserve the capacity to save costs along with the configuration of auto-scaling based on demand.
9. Deployment and testing automation
Utilise IaC tools like AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, etc. to define your serverless resources.
- Make sure to set up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
- For local testing use tools like the Serverless Framework or SAM CLI.
10. Iteration and refining
Every developer knows that prototyping is an iterative process. It means that a prototype goes through a repeated cycle of creation, testing, evaluation, feedback, and improvements. Until the final product meets the desired specifications and requirements.
As, serverless prototyping enables you to experiment rapidly, validate ideas, and iterate.
Hence when your prototype reaches the production phase consider additional factors like scalability, error handling, and resilience.
With the use of all the above best practices, you can create scalable microservices that harness the power of serverless architecture effectively. Though it is a lengthy process and consulting with DevOps professionals who can offer in-depth insights related to serverless architecture, automation, and other cloud add-ons.
Conclusion
Altogether agility proves to be an immensely essential component for any new-age IT company. And to achieve this various modern practices like cloud computing and serverless architecture will pave your way to success.
Yet these are crucial models in which a slight mistake can lead to a massive loss of data & system. Hence reliable DevOps services could be your best option for serverless action! They not only assess your systems but can provide detailed blueprint strategies and architecture models that will best suit your business needs.