Serverless is a Path

Nowadays, people are writing software in countless ways. They have various backgrounds and skillsets with tastes. I believe that modern cloud development should be like assembling Lego blocks. There is no need to write your software modules from scratch in many cases. Serverless is a path where managed services with the utilization of modern services.

In the previous edition, there was a discussion on hosting Graph QL with AWS AppSync instead of reinventing the wheel. Managed service will have better availability and resiliency than the custom one. Probably, there is always a risk of vendor lock. It will mean that changing the cloud provider will become a tedious job.

How is it possible that the team will switch to a different cloud provider? If it is a data center somewhere in Arizona - that's highly possible. However, with AWS, one would not need to worry about this. It is a leader in the public cloud industry. It will stay many years as a great partner in a company's cloud journey.

The fear of vendor lock makes teams choose Kubernetes hosted in virtual machines by the internal DevOps. I think k8s have their advantages and use cases. However, AWS provides the EKS and ECS for container orchestration. It is a trap of always trying to mitigate the danger of using too specific services of one or another cloud provider.

Making architecture decisions is always a search for trade-offs. Managed services will eliminate the overhead of setting up virtual machines or writing YAML configurations for Kubernetes.

Here is a list of managed serverless services for your next project with a functional role in the modern application.

CDN: CloudFront

Page hosting and object storage: S3.

Business Logic and Compute: AWS Lambda functions, Step Functions, AWS Far gate.

Messaging and pub/sub: SQS and SNS, MSK (Kafka), Event Bridge

API: API Gateway, AppSync

Databases: RDS Aurora, DynamoDB and Document DB (NoSQL).

Data streaming: Kinesis family of services