Serverless Cheat Sheet

Why Serverless?

• Evolution of computing
  • Server → Virtual Machines → Containers
    • Cost control, maximizing utilization of resource by having a better granularity
    • Ease of operation, VMs and containers are software-based so could be automated easily
  • Data Center → Cloud → Managed → Serverless
    • Scalability, to support rapid growth of business in time
    • Shift of focus, companies should invest more resources on serving customers, not worrying about IT infrastructure and operation
    • Cost control, on-demand or pay-per-use means no need to predict and provision, cost follows actual business volume closely
    • Ease of operation, no physical servers and data centers, limited software operations, completely no server to manage
• Serverless pros
  • Pay only for what you use, not for the idle time
  • No servers, no software operations, user only focuses on most basic parameters, code and architecture
  • User automatically gain good security, auto scaling, monitoring, logging
• Serverless cons
  • Requires learning and adopting a new paradigm that is still developing
    • Development and deployment
    • Architecture patterns
    • Best practices
  • When business is highly stable, the cost of serverless services may be higher than other implementations
  • Tight coupling with vendors

Implications of Serverless

• Serverless promotes new way of thinking about IT resources
  • Almost zero start cost, so starting a project, a startup, an innovation project is a no-brainer, no approval or internal process needed
  • Not need to pay for idle resources, so a service could be built, and put there without cost
  • Instant service resurrection, although you are not paying for idle resources, when there are new requests coming in, they will be served timely
• Serverless was created based on the hypothesis
  • Companies need to innovate quickly
  • Innovations are highly unpredictable and volatile
  • …if these do not hold then serverless is not valuable

AWS Serverless Services

• Serverless Compute
  • Lambda
    • Pay by per 100ms of execution time + very low per request cost
• Serverless API Gateway
  • API Gateway
    • Pay by request
• Serverless Message Queue
  • SQS
    • Pay by request
• Serverless NoSQL Database
  • NOTE: Databases will store data, and by the definition of persistent storage it cannot be fully serverless. User will need to pay for the storage as long as it is used.
  • DynamoDB
    • Pay by request + storage
  • Aurora Serverless
• Serverless Notification
  • SNS
• Serverless Log Collection
  • NOTE: Similar to databases, logging services will store logs and incur storage cost. Also note we see a blurred line of Serverless and SaaS in the case of log collection.
  • CloudWatch Logs
• Serverless Event Bus
  • EventBridge
• Serverless Tools
  • Serverless Application Model (SAM)