You must have heard the adage, "Things change very fast in the digital world." If you're a repeat reader, you've probably read us writing this in our articles and playbook. As you keep abreast of everything changing, you'll often encounter advancements that impact how you build software.

One such change has been Serverless. In this article, I'll write about Serverless and its influence on engineering practices. As I have used Serverless, I find myself looking at the functions I've written and thinking as to how what I've written is built for reuse, availability, security, and much more. If you learn how to build with it, you'll automatically have all of these great engineering practices as a part of your code without having to think twice. Let's dive in.

1. Single-Purpose Components

One of the key benefits of serverless architecture is the ability to decompose applications into smaller, single-purpose components. This approach encourages modular design and promotes code reusability. Developers can focus on building small, independent functions that perform specific tasks, making it easier to maintain and evolve the system over time.

By breaking down an application into smaller units, developers can adopt a microservices architecture (if they want to), which provides scalability and flexibility. Each function can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, allowing for rapid iterations and incremental improvements.

2. Enhanced Security Through Self-Contained Environments

In traditional application architectures, securing the entire infrastructure can be challenging and time-consuming. However, with serverless architecture, each function runs in its own self-contained environment, which provides a natural isolation barrier. This isolation minimizes the attack surface and reduces the risk of vulnerabilities propagating across the system.

Furthermore, serverless providers typically offer security features such as managed authentication, authorization, and encryption out-of-the-box. These built-in security measures free developers from the burden of implementing them themselves, allowing them to focus on building business logic instead.

3. Streamlined Deployments for Faster Iterations

Deploying updates to traditional infrastructure can be a cumbersome process, requiring complex configuration management and coordination. With serverless architecture, deployments become simpler and more streamlined. Functions can be deployed independently, enabling teams to iterate faster and deliver updates to production with ease.

Moreover, with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, developers can automate the testing and deployment process, reducing human error and improving overall efficiency. Rapid iterations and quick rollbacks become a reality, enabling teams to respond to user feedback and market demands more effectively.

4. Security with the Least-Privilege Principle

Serverless architectures promote the implementation of the least-privilege principle, which means that each function only has the necessary permissions to perform its specific task. This granular approach to permissions enhances security by reducing the potential impact of compromised functions.

By adopting the least-privilege principle, developers can prevent unauthorized access to sensitive resources and mitigate the risk of potential data breaches. This security-conscious approach aligns with modern best practices and ensures that applications remain secure in an increasingly interconnected world.

5. High Availability and Fault Tolerance

High availability and fault tolerance are critical aspects of any system. Traditional architectures often require redundant infrastructure and complex failover mechanisms to achieve these goals. However, with serverless architecture, fault tolerance and high availability are built-in by design.

Serverless providers automatically handle the scaling and replication of functions, ensuring that applications can handle increasing load and failure scenarios gracefully. By leveraging the elasticity of cloud computing, serverless architectures are resilient to failures and can automatically recover without manual intervention.

6. Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice that allows developers to define and provision infrastructure resources using code. Serverless architecture aligns well with this approach, as infrastructure components are typically defined as code and can be versioned, tested, and deployed alongside application code.

By treating infrastructure as code, teams can benefit from all the advantages of modern development practices, such as version control, automated testing, and collaboration. IaC enables the creation of reproducible environments, reducing inconsistencies and simplifying the deployment process.

7. Battle-Tested Components for Robust Solutions

Serverless architectures often leverage managed services provided by cloud providers, such as databases, queues, and authentication mechanisms. These managed services are battle-tested and highly reliable, allowing developers to offload the operational burden and focus on delivering business value.

By relying on managed services, developers can take advantage of scalability, fault tolerance, and performance optimizations without having to build and maintain these capabilities themselves. This approach not only reduces operational overhead but also increases the robustness and stability of the application.

8. Cost Efficiency with Auto-Scaling

Serverless architecture offers cost efficiency through auto-scaling capabilities. With traditional architectures, organizations often have to provision resources based on peak usage, leading to underutilization and wasted costs during periods of low demand. However, serverless functions automatically scale up and down based on the incoming workload, ensuring optimal resource allocation and cost savings.

By leveraging auto-scaling, organizations can achieve significant cost reductions by paying only for the actual usage of resources. This flexible pricing model allows businesses to align their costs with the value they derive from their applications, making serverless architecture an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations.

Where to go from here?

By embracing serverless, development teams can simplify development, enhance security, streamline deployments, prioritize security, achieve high availability, implement infrastructure as code, and leverage battle-tested components.

These out of the box capabilities help development teams to focus on the business logic. These capabilities also ensure that development teams are naturally using the best engineering practices. These practices allow them to make rapid changes to the system without having to worry about cost, scale, security, and more.

If you’re contemplating on using Serverless on a new project or are thinking of migrating an existing system to Serverless we’re here to help. Wednesday has worked with some of the top unicorns to revamp their existing systems. If you’d like to learn about our services book a call here.

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