Introduction

Serverless architecture is a modernized approach to building and deploying applications and has gained a lot of traction in recent years. It allows developers to focus more on being innovative and writing code, rather than managing infrastructure, which results in significant cost savings, increased scalability, and accelerated developer velocity. However, making the transition to a serverless architecture can be challenging. In this article, we will discuss some tips to help make the transition to a serverless architecture smoother and less stressful! Let’s dive in~

First and foremost, it's essential to understand the limitations of serverless. While it can be a very cost-effective and scalable solution, there may be better fits for some applications. For example, applications with high-compute needs or those that require long-running processes may not be well suited for serverless. It's very important to evaluate your specific use case and determine if serverless is the right fit for your organization before starting the transition process.

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Secondly, you should have a solid plan in place for monitoring and debugging in a serverless environment. Considering the fact that serverless functions are event-driven, traditional monitoring and debugging methods most likely do not apply. Tools such as CloudWatch Logs can help with this, but it's important to have a strategy in place for identifying and resolving issues in a serverless environment. Additionally, it's important to have a good understanding of the underlying infrastructure and how it impacts the performance and scalability of your serverless applications.

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Another important step is to break down monolithic applications into smaller and more manageable functions. This allows for easier deployment and scaling of your individual components, and can also improve security by reducing the attack surface. It's also a good practice to design your functions in a “stateless" way, meaning they aren't influenced by previous events, so they can easily be scaled horizontally.

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Lastly, it's important to have a good testing strategy in place, because serverless functions are event-driven. Testing in a serverless context is similar to an extent with non-serverless workloads, however only relying on unit tests which target small sections of business logic doesn’t go far enough. In a serverless setup, we need unit tests to accelerate developers prior to deployments to the cloud, end-to-end tests on the real deployed infrastructure with automatic rollbacks in place, and performance tests to understand how our code will hold up under production level traffic. 

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In conclusion, adopting a serverless architecture can bring your organization many benefits, such as increasing innovation, accelerating developer velocity, reducing costs and maintenance, and enabling your infrastructure to scale more effectively. Although, the transition can come with its own set of challenges. By understanding the limitations of serverless, having a plan in place for areas like monitoring and debugging, setting a clear foundation for how to break down your monolithic applications, and creating good testing strategies, you will have a much smoother transition to a serverless architecture and experience the many benefits it has to offer.

Serverless Guru has been guiding enterprise companies through their digital transformations since 2018. As an Advanced Partner with AWS, we are trusted serverless experts who are ready to tackle any obstacle thrown our way. From green field applications to a full adoption we are your one-stop solution. Being a global team means we’re able to work with any time zone necessary to get the job done! If this sounds interesting, please reach out to info@serverlessguru.com for more information!