SERVERLESS

BEYOND THE BUZZWORD 2nd EDITION

By Thomas Smart

Provides a deep and broad understanding of Serverless architecture and its impact on your organization and projects. Explores cloud strategy, team structure, budget management, security, and other aspects your enterprise must consider. Enables application teams to successfully and productively deliver Serverless applications

Know how Serverless and cloud-native systems work, their benefits and roles in automating and optimizing organizations, and the challenges to be considered. Anyone interested in Serverless architecture will benefit from this book, regardless of their level of technical understanding.

This revised and expanded new edition explains many related terms, such as microservices, cloud-native, architecture, several relevant AWS services, and how it all works together to produce cost-effective, scalable solutions in the cloud. The book starts at a high level and gradually gets more in-depth and technical.

The less technical decision maker will learn how Serverless can affect finance, security, people, and compliance. The book touches on important decisions, such as selecting and working with external or internal specialists and teams; finding, evaluating, and training them; and the flexibility and dynamics available within digital projects.

Deployment automation and DevOps also feature heavily in this book, and you will find real-world use cases and examples of Serverless architecture to get you started. It's worth noting that this book is not a development guide; it gives you a comprehensive understanding of what Serverless is so you can make informed decisions for your organization and projects.

This Book Will Be Useful For

Executive or Manager

Your technical people have been talking about Serverless for some time. You are interested but want to make sure it's the right strategic choice for your business or project.

Project Manager or Team Lead

Tasked with digital transformation and accountable for the budget, you are looking for a technology strategy that will give you an unfair advantage. Development and operational cost estimates need to be accurate and dependable.

Entrepreneur or Innovation Manager

You are looking for a technology solution for your platform that enables you to be cost-effective, ideally with an operational cost that is relative to the number of users and revenue stream. The technology needs to be flexible so you can rapidly prototype and iterate as new ideas and pivots appear.

Software Architect or Developer

You are interested in Serverless and think it might be the right technical choice but want to understand the broader implications, opportunities and risks to help pitch it to your stakeholders. You are also looking for ways to explain the technical benefits in a non-technical way to help stakeholders and decisionmakers understand what Serverless can do for the project and users.

743

Pages

10

Chapters

2

Convenient Formats

Chapter 01. Serverless Basics

What Will You Learn

This book will help you understand what people mean when they are talking about ‘Serverless’.

I want to share the facts and background of Serverless to help you decide for yourself if it is a technology fad or a technology evolution. You’ll be able to determine if it’s relevant to you, your career and your business, and what impact it might have if you were to start using it in your projects. Understand the relationship between Serverless, cloud-native and microservices and how Serverless can improve not only cloud applications, but business models, productivity and other business strategies.

WHAT IS SERVERLESS: What are people so excited about and what technology evolutions have lead to Serverless being available?
WHY SERVERLESS: What are the benefits and challenges of serverless and why is an important evolution in cloud technology?
HOW TO SERVERLESS: Where do you go from here, how to find the right people and start using Serverless in your projects?

Chapters

Chapter 1: Serverless basics

Introduces Serverless and its, history, challenges and benefits with simple high-level explanations and examples. This chapter also discusses how cloud-native and microservices are related to Serverless to provide a wider understanding of the cloud.

Chapter 2: Strategy

The strategy chapter covers several initiatives that should happen before an organisation launches a serverless-first strategy. These initiatives cover the people, processes, and technology that should be in place to use the cloud more productively, especially for modern architectures such as Serverless.

Chapter 3: Finances

Impact of Serverless on finance within an organisation. It answers question such as: How are business models, estimates and budgets evolving with Serverless?

Chapter 4: Security

Delve deeper into the strategic impact of Serverless on security within an organisation. It answers question such as: How does Serverless impact security and GDPR or similar privacy regulations?

Chapter 5: People

The most important asset of an organisation is its people. This section answers questions such as:
Where do I find and how do I assess the right talent for a Serverless team?
How can we be more agile and fast-paced in our digital projects?

Chapter 6: DevOps and Tooling

We explore DevOps concepts and how Serverless can be automated at a project and a business level to optimise cloud development and deployment. How can Serverless make life easier for application teams and greatly increase productivity?

Chapter 7: Data

Data is often one of the most important assets within an organisation. As such, there are high expectations around protecting and managing it. With the advancement of technology and the wide adoption of the cloud, specialised databases have been built that cater to specific use cases.

Chapter 8: Logging and Testing

logging is critical for productive serverless development, and how we test applications needs to change to adapt to its distributed nature. Logging is an important aspect of any application development and is certainly not unique to Serverless architecture. However, the distributed and asynchronous nature of Serverless makes troubleshooting considerably more challenging if there is no logging strategy in place.

Chapter 9: Architecture

In this chapter we look at architecture patterns, some of the top cloud services for Serverless projects. While this chapter does get more technical, it is certainly worth looking at to better understand what the technical teams are talking about and to help get them started with best practices.

Chapter 10: Case Studies

The final chapter 10, covers several serverless case studies in technical detail. Providing an example to follow for new projects.

About The Author

Thomas Smart has been actively involved with digital projects since 2002 and with cloud since 2010. His experience crosses many sectors and types and sizes of business – all of which give him a wealth of experience and knowledge to draw upon as part of his consulting services.

His passion for Serverless comes from his focus on innovation, rapid prototyping and designing solutions that are as cost-effective as possible. Serverless, as you will see in this book, is very suitable for all these goals.