Serverless Transformation #36: Strides towards Serverless

The abstraction provided by Serverless technologies make it easier and faster to build applications – but that comes with the risk of knowledge gaps.

In this article, Sheen Brisals warns against taking shortcuts – and suggests you should make time to understand foundational concepts such as the shared responsibility model.

To help with this, Sheen introduces the idea of threat modelling, and links it back to the Well-Architected Framework.

People often find moving to DynamoDB the hardest part of building serverless applications. If you’re using AppSync, there are a few ways you can make the transition easier. Here, Yan Cui shows you how to model one-to-many relationships, and how AppSync can do joins for you.

Still unsure whether to make the leap to Serverless? The team at DraftKings recently did, and this article by Matt Robinson provides a high-level overview of their decisions and findings – including, interestingly, the fact that the switch helped make their infrastructure more environmentally sustainable. 

He also describes the ‘hybrid’ server/serverless approach they used to make their Serverless adoption more manageable, which sounds vaguely familiar…

Meanwhile: Ibrahim Cesar shares his thoughts on the non-technical aspects of adapting to a Serverless world – ranging from the steep learning curve, to the need to be ‘cost-aware’ of every decision we make.

Doing things ‘the Amazon way’ can sometimes be counter-intuitive, but you can’t say it doesn’t work!

Allen Helton talks about seven Design Principles that AWS recommends for Serverless architecture, and explains the reasoning behind them. We often find people struggle the most with orchestration and event-driven architecture in particular - this is a great introduction to both!