Architecting Serverless Applications with AWS

Serverless architectures enable developers to create and deploy apps and services without stressing about infrastructure management. Your application still runs on servers, but Amazon Web Services manages all server administration (AWS). You no longer need to provision, scale, and operate your own servers to run your apps, databases, and storage systems with serverless.

However for serverless architectures a detailed understanding of several variables, such as migration techniques, available alternatives for compute and data storage, and various application architectural patterns, is required for the complex process of designing serverless applications. The variety of computational and storage resources that may be used in the creation of serverless apps must also be understood. Databases, messaging platforms, and other external services that may be included into the application design are examples of these resources. Also, one must be familiar with the many application design patterns that are available and how to use them in order to improve the serverless application’s overall architecture.

One has to be aware of the many application design patterns that are out there and how to leverage them for certain use cases. Each of these elements must be carefully taken into account in order to develop serverless apps that are highly functional and scalable and satisfy the requirements of contemporary computing environments.

Migration strategies

It’s crucial that you select services and patterns when creating your application that are appropriate for your workloads according to variables like projected throughput, service restrictions, and cost. This enables you to deploy serverless architectures in a way that is tailored to the tasks your solutions must complete as well as the abilities and organizational structures you are using.

Amazon serverless approaches can provide several advantages, such as increased scalability, decreased operational overhead, and cost savings.

Shifting to serverless architecture in AWS requires careful planning and consideration of several factors. Here are 5 questions that you may need to answer first:

1. What is the goal of implementing serverless architecture? What precise advantages are you hoping to obtain?
2. Which AWS services should you use for your serverless architecture?
3. How will you deploy and manage your serverless applications? Will you use AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model), AWS CloudFormation, or other deployment tools?
4. How will you handle security and compliance requirements in your serverless architecture? AWS provides several security features and services that can help you secure your serverless applications.
5. How will you monitor and troubleshoot your serverless applications?

Your migration strategy is determined by how your applications are currently written, the current architecture of your applications, and the desired state

There are three migration patterns that you may use to convert your old Architecture to a serverless paradigm.

Leapfrog

The leapfrog pattern allows you to skip intermediate phases and proceed directly from an on-premises traditional architecture to a serverless cloud architecture.

Organic

The organic pattern involves a more lift-and-shift strategy to migrating on-premises apps to the cloud. Existing applications are maintained in this model, either by continuing to run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or by receiving some minor updates from container services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), or AWS Fargate.

Along the adoption curve, you start to take a more strategic look at serverless and microservices to evaluate how they may aid businesses in achieving goals like market agility, developer creativity, and total cost of ownership.

Strangler

Using the?Strangler?paradigm, a company gradually replaces parts of the traditional program with event-driven components while also establishing APIs to breakdown monolithic applications.

API endpoints can point to old compared to new components. Serverless feature branches may be implemented first, and legacy components can be retired as they are replaced. This design is a more methodical approach to serverless adoption, allowing you to get to crucial changes where you may realize benefits rapidly but with less risk and upheaval than the leapfrog paradigm.

Serverless Compute Services

When we consider serverless architecture on AWS, Lambda serverless computing may be the first option that comes to mind, but?Fargate?is another serverless compute solution that may be more suitable for your workload.

With Fargate, you can run containers without managing the underlying infrastructure, such as EC2 instances, clusters, and scaling. Instead, Fargate manages the infrastructure for you, including scaling, patching, and updates.

Fargate allows you to deploy containers as a serverless application, which means you only pay for the resources that your containers use while they are running. This can help reduce costs and increase efficiency because you don’t need to pay for idle resources. This enables you to migrate to serverless architecture while taking a more lift-and-shift strategy.

This might result in a quicker first transition to a serverless architecture with fewer operational adjustments for your development teams.

Simply put, AWS Fargate could be a better fit. It’s a preferable option, for instance, if your processes take longer to complete or your deployment packages are bigger than what the Lambda service can handle. Lambda may be more suited for activities that run under 15 minutes and have spiky, unpredictable use patterns, whereas it may be more appropriate for workloads with constant, predictable utilization patterns.

When building a serverless application based on serverless architecture best practices, Fargate can help in?Scalability, Resilience, Security,?Cost optimization?and?Developer productivity.

Serverless Storage Systems

It’s much simpler to utilize multiple database options for different circumstances when you have understood and adopted serverless approach and accepted the necessity to move away from a single, shared general purpose database. The key is to match the data store to the business requirement and the type of transactions that must be supported.

One of the primary advantages of serverless storage systems is that they are highly scalable. Developers can easily scale up or down the storage capacity as per their requirements without having to make any changes to the underlying infrastructure. This makes serverless storage systems an excellent choice for applications with varying workloads, as they can quickly adapt to changing demands.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides serverless data storage solutions that cater to a wide range of needs, from transactional to query-based operations. These data stores are designed with a specific purpose in mind, making it easier for users to find the perfect match for their particular use case. With AWS’s serverless data stores, businesses can enjoy high performance, scalability, and reliability without having to worry about the underlying technology or infrastructure, allowing them to focus on their core competencies and achieve their business objectives more efficiently.

Following are the serverless storages options available in AWS that can be use as standalone or side by side depending on the serverless architectural requirements.

Serverless Architecture Patterns

Serverless architecture patterns are design patterns that are used to develop applications using serverless computing. Serverless computing is a cloud computing model in which the cloud provider manages the infrastructure required to run and scale applications, and customers only pay for the resources used to execute their code.

Now as we have understood to decompose and migrate application’s functionality to serverless, We can focus on how to extend architecture spatterns into more complex distributed applications.

Here are some of the common serverless architecture patterns:

FaaS (function as a service)?— In this design pattern, developers create individual functions and upload them to a cloud provider, who then executes them in response to user requests. The underlying infrastructure, including scale and availability, is managed by the cloud provider.

Event-driven architecture?— This pattern uses a combination of FaaS and messaging services to build applications that respond to events. For example, a user uploads a file to a cloud storage service, which triggers a function to process the file.

Microservices?— This pattern breaks down an application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. Each service can be implemented using a serverless architecture.

API Gateway?— In this pattern, an API gateway is used to route incoming requests to the appropriate serverless functions. This allows developers to create a single entry point for their application, which can then be scaled and managed independently.

Here our main focus is on?event-driven architecture, (EDA) is a common pattern used for building serverless applications. This approach involves designing applications as a collection of small, single-purpose functions that are triggered by events. These events could be generated by a variety of sources, such as user actions, database updates, or incoming messages from other services.

An architecture for serverless web applications can based on a common event-driven paradigm, with Lambda serving as the application layer, Amazon API Gateway handling HTTP requests, and Amazon DynamoDB handling database operations.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) encourages loose coupling between system components, resulting in better adaptability. Microservices can scale independently, fail without affecting other services, and minimize process complexity.

Overall, serverless architecture patterns offer several benefits, including reduced operational overhead, faster time-to-market, and improved scalability and availability.

You can use the?Serverless Patterns Collection ?and the?AWS Serverless Application Repository ?to help jump-start your work to reduce undifferentiated heavy lifting.

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