Serverless Development: 6 Key Best Practices

As a developer, you've embraced the serverless revolution. You've built applications that scale effortlessly, respond to events in real-time, and free you from the burdens of server management. You're pretty good at this serverless thing by now.

But how do you take your skills to the next level? How do you go from being a competent serverless developer to an expert craftsman of cloud-native applications?

The answer lies in mastering the key practices that separate the good from the great. In this article, we'll explore six essential practices that will elevate your serverless game. From leveraging managed services to handling failures and costs efficiently, these practices will help you build serverless applications that are not just functional, but exceptional.

So, if you're ready to take your serverless skills to the next level, let's dive in.

1. Embrace Managed Services

One of the biggest advantages of serverless is the ability to leverage managed services. Instead of worrying about provisioning and maintaining infrastructure, you can focus on writing application logic. Services like databases, message queues, and storage can be easily integrated into your serverless architecture.

For example, consider using Amazon DynamoDB for storing data. With DynamoDB, you don't need to manage the underlying servers or worry about scaling. It seamlessly handles the heavy lifting, allowing you to concentrate on building features that matter to your users.

By embracing managed services, you can significantly reduce operational overhead and accelerate development cycles. It's a win-win situation: you get to build faster while the cloud provider takes care of the infrastructure.

• PCG Managed Services

2. Design for Stateless Operations

When it comes to serverless functions, statelessness is key. Stateless functions are designed to be independent and self-contained, without relying on any external state or shared resources. This allows them to scale effortlessly and handle multiple concurrent invocations.

• Become idempotent
  To achieve true statelessness, instead of meditating or ingesting psychedelics, make sure that your functions are idempotent—meaning they produce the same output for the same input, regardless of how many times they are executed. Avoid storing any state within the function itself, and instead rely on external services like databases or object storage to persist data.

By designing stateless functions, you enable the serverless platform to scale your application automatically based on the incoming workload. This means you can handle sudden spikes in traffic without worrying about provisioning additional resources manually.

3. Optimize Function Performance

While serverless functions are designed to scale automatically, it's still crucial to optimize their performance. The faster your functions execute, the better the user experience and the lower the costs.

• Keep your functions lightweight
  To optimize function performance, keep your functions lightweight and focused on a single task. Avoid loading unnecessary dependencies or libraries that can slow down the function's startup time. Instead, package only the essential code and dependencies required for the function to run.
• Manage function timeouts
  Another key aspect of performance optimization is managing function timeouts. Set appropriate timeout values based on the expected execution time of your functions. This prevents functions from running indefinitely and consuming unnecessary resources.
• Cold start mitigation
  Consider using techniques like cold start mitigation to minimize the latency experienced by users when a function is invoked after a period of inactivity. Strategies such as provisioned concurrency or keeping functions warm can help reduce cold start times significantly.

4.Implement CI/CD Pipelines

In the fast-paced and frankly quite impatient world of serverless development, automation is your best friend. Implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can significantly streamline your development process and ensure high-quality code reaches production quickly.

• Use a CI/CD tool
  CI/CD pipelines automate the build, test, and deployment stages of your serverless application. By integrating your code repository with a CI/CD tool, automated builds are triggered whenever changes are pushed, ensuring that any code changes are thoroughly tested before being deployed to production. Automated testing, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, is a crucial component of these pipelines, catching bugs or regressions early in the development cycle.
• Sit back and relax
  Once tests pass, the CI/CD pipeline can automatically deploy your serverless application to the desired environment, eliminating the need for manual deployments and reducing the risk of human error.

This consistent and reliable deployment process enhances team collaboration by providing a clear audit trail of all changes deployed to production. As a result, implementing CI/CD pipelines saves time, reduces errors, and enables rapid delivery of new features and updates to users.

5.Secure and Monitor Your Serverless Functions

While serverless platforms abstract away much of the infrastructure management, security and monitoring remain critical responsibilities for developers. Implementing robust security measures and comprehensive monitoring is essential to ensure the integrity and reliability of your serverless application.

• Grant serverless functions only the permissions they need
  When it comes to security, apply the principle of least privilege by granting serverless functions only the permissions they need. Use IAM roles and policies for granular access controls, restricting access to sensitive resources. Encrypt sensitive data both at rest and in transit using cloud provider encryption services and secure communication protocols like HTTPS. Implement proper authentication and authorization mechanisms with industry-standard protocols like OAuth or JWT, and validate and sanitize user input to prevent vulnerabilities like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).
• Enable detailed logging and set up dashboards
  Monitoring is equally important in a serverless environment. Enable detailed logging to capture important events, errors, and performance metrics, and use log aggregation and analysis tools for centralized analysis. Leverage real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities from your serverless platform, setting up dashboards to visualize key metrics and configuring alerts for anomalies or performance issues.

By prioritizing security and monitoring, you can build a robust serverless application, ensuring regular security audits, penetration testing, and adherence to the latest security best practices. Remember, security is a shared responsibility between you and your cloud provider.

6. Handle Failures and Costs Efficiently

While serverless platforms offer automatic scaling and high availability, it's still crucial to design your application to handle failures gracefully and optimize costs. After all, even the most reliable systems can experience hiccups, and every invocation of your functions comes with a price tag.

• Implement robust error handling mechanisms
  To handle failures effectively, implement robust error handling mechanisms in your serverless functions. Anticipate and catch potential exceptions, log meaningful error messages, and return appropriate error responses to clients. Use retry mechanisms to handle transient failures like network timeouts. Implement circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures, ensuring your functions don’t get stuck in a loop of retries and maintaining application stability.

• Optimize your code and use caching
  Managing costs is crucial in a serverless environment, as platforms charge based on function invocations and duration. Optimize resource usage by minimizing function execution time, optimizing code, and using efficient algorithms. Allocate appropriate memory sizes to functions, avoiding both over- and under-provisioning. Implement caching mechanisms to reduce redundant computations and function invocations.

Also remember to regularly monitor usage and costs, using insights to identify optimization opportunities. Embrace the serverless mindset, focusing on cost-efficiency and resilience by handling failures gracefully and optimizing resource usage.

Unlock the full potential of serverless

By following these best practices and embracing the serverless mindset, you can unlock the full potential of serverless architecture. You'll be able to build scalable, cost-effective, and maintainable applications that can adapt to changing business requirements with ease.

So, go forth and conquer the serverless world! With the right mindset and practices, you'll be well on your way to mastering serverless development and delivering exceptional value to your users.