The serverless model can free technical teams from the more monotonous development work, allowing them to focus on innovation. And using a serverless database to build cloud-native apps amplifies such benefits due to its ability to scale without being hindered by fragmented data across independently deployed services.
This Refcard dives straight into building a serverless Java web application. You'll find a list of tools needed to follow the tutorial as well as comprehensive step-by-step instructions, code snippets, and a companion repository for the sample serverless application.
Step Functions, the serverless finite state machine service from AWS. With DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, it forms the core of serverless AWS services. If you have tasks with multiple steps and you want to ensure they will get executed in the proper order, Step Functions is your service of choice.
It offers direct integrations with many AWS services, so you don’t need to use Lambda Functions as glue. This can improve the performance of your state machine and lower its costs.
Preamble — Problems to Solve
Firing up new Serverless containers — a.k.a. cold starts — takes from one to several seconds (time varies per platform). To eliminate such cost/latency, Serverless frameworks keep already started containers warm for a period of time (duration varies per provider).
Serverless functions might make database access. Although less costly than starting new Serverless container, database connection creation and tear down may cost tens or even hundreds of milliseconds depending on your DBMS environment. This problem is exacerbated with Serverless functions that are are short-lived and cannot afford such cost on every call.
Like any other application, continuous testing of serverless applications is essential to ensure the quality of the product. Testing a serverless application is not drastically different from testing a regular application. In traditional application testing, we configure an environment similar to the production environment in the development area and test it. But when dealing with the serverless providers, you cannot simulate the exact production environment. In this article, let's talk about testing serverless applications and the alterations we should make to the normal testing process.
Serverless Applications: Unit Testing
In unit testing, we test each unit of code individually without involving other third-party code and services. In the serverless context, unit testing is pretty much the same as in traditional application testing. So, you can use the same test frameworks like Jasmine, Mocha, Jest, etc., when testing serverless applications. In the serverless concept, most of the complexities are around serverless functions and their integrations. So, the effort of the unit testing for a serverless application is comparatively low.
I love technology and learn whenever I can, on the job or not.
Went to work last evening for some usual stuff to be handled. The founder and I got into the discussion of our architecture and how we are trying to move away from spending time on IT management and concentrating on more time to serve the customers by using a fully serverless architecture which is run on AWS (Lambdas, S3, API Gateways and Step Functions). We talked about a couple of benefits of serverless for an hour or so. Talking about it kind of enticed me to come home and look for a serverless deployment of a blog I could set up. So, I started scouring the internet.
