Analytics
5 min
A recent study found that 69 percent of CIOs identified process automation and transformation as the focus of their digital agendas. Serverless will likely be the technology companies use to automate application deployment, scaling, maintenance, and monitoring.
A serverless environment abstracts hardware provisioning from the development process.
This approach frees teams to work on projects that help drive the business strategy. Essentially, it shifts developers from operations to strategists and innovators.
This quick guide discusses how to build production-ready serverless applications and how they can benefit your company.
Serverless is a cloud-native development model.
It enables developers to build, test and run applications without dealing with the headache of server management.
They are located off-site and managed by a third-party vendor.
There are several benefits to serverless which make for an efficient development cycle:
To reduce the risk of coding errors affecting each environment, developers set up environments to test code before deployment.
The most common environments are development, test, and production.
There are two approaches that developers use to configure these environments for maximum efficiency.
With this approach, the services and infrastructure each share the same environment.
Differentiating the environments during runtime involves using an environment variable or another mechanism developers define.
The benefit of this approach is that it puts everything in one environment. However, failure in one environment could negatively impact production.
The multi-stack approach uses a separate environment for each service. In this way, developers isolate the code between environments. Changes in one environment don't impact another.
Organizing the code repository makes it easier to locate and make code changes, find errors, and separate work between the team. Two common approaches are:
A monorepo organizes all code into a single repository. All services and their resources for the application are contained in one repository. This type of code repository holds many projects. The benefit of this approach is:
The drawbacks include:
A more effective approach to code organization is a multi-repo. With this strategy, teams put each application into separate repositories. The benefits include:
However, there are downsides:
Until recently, deployment was a manual process.
Now, with automated deployment tools, the process is more efficient when it comes.
With automated deployment tools, developers configure the tool with the specific steps required to deploy the application.
The conveniences of this approach include:
When evaluating how to build production-ready serverless applications developers need to monitor the application’s performance.
Without a way to monitor the application, the team will have a hard time detecting and diagnosing issues.
The below combination of three functions works together to give teams better insight into the application’s performance.
Logging refers to recording an ongoing record of the application's events as they happen.
These log files also track failures and state transformation.
Monitoring is evaluating the application's performance during runtime to collect metrics about system performance.
Developers use metrics to troubleshoot performance issues.
Alerting is a process offered by many monitoring tools.
Its function is to notify the relevant parties in the event the monitoring process detects an issue or some pre-defined criteria set by the team.
Resources such as HTTPS connections, database connections, and connections to other services are often shared across application functions.
Running too many concurrent functions could limit available resource connections.
Paying attention to how functions share resources is important to avoid application errors because of resources being unavailable.
Shifting to serverless is a helpful strategy to optimize infrastructure and personnel resources.
Companies benefit when developers are freed to focus on strategic initiatives.
For more advice on how to build and configure a serverless environment, contact Adservio team of software professionals.