Production-grade serverless – Deloitte On Cloud Blog | Deloitte US has been saved
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.
Get in touch
David Linthicum
Managing Director | Chief Cloud Strategy Officer
As the chief cloud strategy officer for Deloitte Consulting LLP, David is responsible for building innovative technologies that help clients operate more efficiently while delivering strategies that enable them to disrupt their markets. David is widely respected as a visionary in cloud computing—he was recently named the number one cloud influencer in a report by Apollo Research. For more than 20 years, he has inspired corporations and start-ups to innovate and use resources more productively. As the author of more than 13 books and 5,000 articles, David’s thought leadership has appeared in InfoWorld, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, Gigaom, and Lynda.com. Prior to joining Deloitte, David served as senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners, where he grew the practice into a major force in the cloud computing market. Previously, he led Blue Mountain Labs, helping organizations find value in cloud and other emerging technologies. He is a graduate of George Mason University.
