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Testing Serverless Functions

Serverless computing, or functions-as-a-service, has picked up a lot of attention and speed due to its cost-effective pay-as-you-go price offering, multi-language/runtime support, as well as its easy learning curve without any need to provide the infrastructure layer. All the major cloud providers now have a serverless computing offer as part of their services portfolio: Amazon Web Services has Lambda, Microsoft Azure has Azure Functions, and Google Cloud has Cloud Functions. Furthermore, there are on-prem/on-Kubernetes options for running serverless functions on OpenWhisk or OpenFaaS. For the sake of consistency, I will refer to all of these services as serverless functions throughout the rest of this post. 

In a microservices (or even nanoservices, as serverless functions are sometimes known) architecture, there are inherently lots of components, modules, and services that form part of an application or platform. This can make testing a chore, and sometimes a neglected part of the SDLC for these platforms. This article will explore some options and techniques for testing these types of platforms to help make this aspect of your projects easier. Testing should always be a first-class citizen, regardless of the infrastructure. Irrespective of the language, framework, or tools we use, testing is vital to ensure both sustained development velocity and the quality of our deliveries to production. 

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Azure Service Bus Dead-letter Queues

What is the Azure Service Bus Queue?

Queues are a very common piece of infrastructure. It offers First In, First Out (FIFO) message delivery to one or more competing consumers. As the queue grows the last item added to the queue typically must wait longer to be processed. Just like someone waiting in line to order food, the first one in line gets to order first. Microsoft Azure Service Bus (ASB) is Microsoft’s premier enterprise-level messaging technology that uses this principle of FIFO.

Types of Queues:

  • Primary queue called main queue or active queue.
  • Secondary sub-queue called a dead-letter queue (DLQ). 

Main Queue

ASB queues always have two parties involved-a producer and a consumer. The producer pushes the messages into the queue, while the consumer periodically polls for messages and consumes them. The main queue holds the messages until it is consumed or moved to the dead-letter queue.

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The Ultimate Guide to AWS Step Functions

The use of serverless computing has become a must nowadays, and some of you may already know a thing or two about Amazon Web Services like Lambda Functions, Step Functions, and other services AWS provides. However, if this is the first time you hear about them – fantastic!

In this article, we’ll discuss AWS Step Functions, what they are used for, how to use them, and the advantages or disadvantages that they bring.