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“Pets versus cattle” has become something of a standard vernacular for describing the shift in how we build systems. It alludes to the elastic and dynamic nature of these (typically, but not necessarily) container-based systems with on-demand scaling and more transparent fault-tolerance.
Like many other marketing buzzwords, the concept of "serverless" has taken on a life of its own, which can make it difficult to understand what serverless actually means. What it really means is that the cloud provider fully manages server infrastructure all the way up to the application layer. For example, GCE isn't serverless because, while Google manages the physical server infrastructure, we still have to deal with patching operating systems, managing load balancers, configuring firewall rules, and so on. Serverless means we merely worry about our application code and business logic and nothing else. This concept extends beyond pure compute though, including things like databases, message queues, stream processing, machine learning, and other types of systems.
There are several benefits to the serverless model. First, it allows us to focus on building products, not managing infrastructure. These operations-related tasks, while important, are not generally things that differentiate a business. It's just work that has to be done to support the rest of the business. With cloud —and serverless in particular — many of these tasks are becoming commoditized, freeing us up to focus on things that matter to the business.
Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) is a free service that can be used to implement authentication and authorization for applications running in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This includes Google App Engine applications as well as workloads running on Compute Engine (GCE) VMs and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) by way of Google Cloud Load Balancers.
When enabled, IAP requires users accessing a web application to log in using their Google account and ensure they have the appropriate role to access the resource. This can be used to provide secure access to web applications without the need for a VPN. This is part of what Google now calls BeyondCorp, which is an enterprise security model designed to enable employees to work from untrusted networks without a VPN. At Real Kinetic, we frequently bump into companies practicing Death-Star security, which is basically relying on a hard outer shell to protect a soft, gooey interior. It’s simple and easy to administer, but it’s also vulnerable. That’s why we always approach security from a perspective of defense in depth.