Road to production-grade serverless applications

Gary Arora, chief architect, Cloud, hosted a webinar on “Advanced Serverless for Production-Grade Workloads.” The specific session was a mix of slides and hands-on demos to show what it takes to make serverless applications production-ready, with end-to-end automation, real-time observability, and local development capabilities. 

There is a significant breadth of knowledge about what serverless is and how to get started. However, it is the depth that is often overlooked, in terms of what it takes to create production-grade serverless solutions.

Develop a serverless application with ease

Serverless has often been thought of as introducing a new layer of computing; however, it is just an abstraction of the operational elements. The most common use case for serverless is microservices. You can watch Gary as he walks through the steps to develop a microservice, with a database, a thin compute layer, and an API gateway. He underlines the factors behind the speed and ease of getting started, making serverless a popular architectural choice in cloud.

A production-grade serverless solution will consist of several moving parts. It’s important that all components are treated as a single unit so that they can be deployed together and rolled back together. So, all the little pieces—the security policies, the IAM roles, and the different application layers, such as function-as-a-service (FaaS), data stores, and API gateway—all need to come together as one unit.
 

Level up your production-grade serverless application

The road to production-grade serverless requires a combination of frameworks and tools, bringing serverless from the cloud to your local development environment (i.e., your laptop). Next, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines need to be in place to manage the different components as a single unit. And finally, real-time monitoring, logging, and diagnostics capabilities enable you to identify root-cause issues down to the specific component.

The key differentiators between a serverless app and a production-grade serverless app are:

• End-to-end automation;
• Real-time observability, telemetry, and monitoring;
• Local development, debugging, and testing; and
• Security automation.
  

Watch Gary to learn how to make it happen.