Essentials of Going Serverless: Tools and Tips

This blog tells you the Tips and Tools to go serverless, but let us know what serverless is. Does it mean that there are no servers involved? The answer is no. What it means is that you are not responsible for provisioning or maintaining these servers. It is outsourced to the cloud provider while a developer concentrates on developing code or any business logic.

Serverless computing offers simple cost reduction and scalability, with a billing model called pay-as-you-go but adopting serverless technology is a bit difficult. The main reason is that using serverless means rearranging everything you have done on the traditional software delivery model, server-based compute stack, infrastructure management, continuous delivery, continuous integration, and source code development, as well as operational features like security and monitoring.

Serverless contains two different camps; each defines the application architecture. The first one is BaaS(Back-end as a Service), which pertains to any application which features most of its back-end over the cloud. And the other one is FaaS(Function as a Service) features an application that executes the parts of their code using event triggers.

Advantages of using serverless technology:

Now, let us discuss the benefits of using serverless technology:

1. Easy to deploy: If you are willing to spin up the application fast, serverless is your best option. Instead of deploying your application in weeks or months using serverless, you can do it in hours and days. The main reason behind it is you do not need to worry about the infrastructure. You can just concentrate on your coding.
2. Low cost: Going serverless means you are cutting a good amount of expenses because managing databases, servers, and some sort of logic is not your responsibility, and serverless requires less human effort and less computing power comparatively.
3. Best Scalability: If you are willing to be the next Google, you have to concentrate on your server capacity, but if you are going to use the serverless architecture, it helps you grow faster without worrying about the server.

Tips to create strong serverless components:

Ten simple tips to create strong serverless components are:

1. Always start thinking from the outcome perspective.
2. Look for real-time examples.
3. Try to reuse the already existing components.
4. Most of the state must be in the provider state.
5. Maintain name collisions and modifications.
6. Identify the changes in inputs.
7. Try to use the provider errors in your favor.
8. Removal must not use inputs. Instead, it must use states.
9. Try to save your time by using Core Utils.
10. Finally, publish your component.

Tools that make adopting Serverless Technology easy:

There are three types of tools that support serverless adoption, they are:
1. Tools that handle Development:

Undoubtedly the very first and most important capability we need to build serverless solutions is a development by using resource arrangement artifacts and author function code.

The tools that are used to handle the serverless Development are:

1. SLAppForge: SLAppForge is an industry that provides a web-based IDE(Integrated Development Environment) named SIGMA, which is the very first custom-built IDE used for generating, testing, and debugging the Serverless functions.

SIGMA is a complete browser-based IDE that offers a hybrid Drag-and-Drop code generation feature for GCP and AWS. It directly connects with AWS, GCP cloud servers, and Git VCS systems and does not include virtual machines, Containers, or computers running behind.

2. Stackery: Stackery is another entry whose primary goal is to simplify server development. It concentrates on infrastructure management and enables industries to build and maintain infrastructure stacks by implementing Drag-and-Drop UI editor.

Stackery connects with GitHub and AWS and provides CLI(Command Line Interface), which replaces the external CI/CD tools and UI applications. This product also shows the metrics and logs of AWS CloudWatch using CLI and UI.

2. Tools used to monitor serverless applications
While creation and deployment are the essential and initial steps, monitoring those deployed serverless applications becomes more than necessary. If they are not working correctly, the organization’s reputation can fall. Hence, few tools are predominantly used to monitor the performance of the deployed serverless applications, and the tools are:

1. Dashbird: Dashboard is a tool used to monitor/observe the performance of serverless applications. It also monitors the performance of API gateways, ECS containers, Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, Kinesis, Access logs, and Step-functions. Dashbird traces the entire data at one place without any instrumentation of code and set up modifications.

2. Epsagon: Epsagon is a tool that helps us to monitor and troubleshoot the problems/errors in the microservice environment. Epsagon’s main aim is to allow Dev and Ops teams to work efficiently by correlating the data, finding issues, and identifying the root cause of that problem.

This product connects with AWS to retrieve the additional metadata about function logs, metrics, and configurations.

3. Thundra: Thundra is a tool that collates traces, metrics, and logs. The Thundra UIs provide detailed analysis and high-level summaries for unique functions. This product allows manual as well as automated instrumentation methods for AWS lambda runtimes.

Tools for maintaining security:

Even if you deploy the product and monitor it consistently, some attackers find a way to attack the system; hence having tools to handle security is very important. Now, finally, let us see some tools which address safety, and the tools are:

1. Protego: Protego is a platform of application security whose primary focus is on complete lifecycle security like right from the deployment to runtime. This platform integrates with cloud account scanning to identify the address issues related to permissions and roles. The Protego platform supports Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, and it also supports the functions that are using java runtimes, node.js, and python.
2. PureSec: PureSec is a security platform that offers end-to-end security solutions for all serverless architectures. This platform analyzes the functions when created or packaged within the CI/CD tool to address the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.

Going Serverless with Infosec Train:

InfoSecTrain is one of the best globally recognized training platforms focusing on Information security services and IT security training. Infosec Train helps to learn how to adopt serverless and many serverless techniques. So do visit our website to know more.

AUTHOR
Yamuna Karumuri ( )
Content Writer

“ Yamuna Karumuri is a B.tech graduate in computer science. She likes to learn new things and enjoys spreading her knowledge through blogs. She is currently working as a content writer with Infosec Train. “