{"id":1020,"date":"2019-11-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cmagazine.test\/going-serverless-the-easy-way\/"},"modified":"2021-12-23T14:25:51","modified_gmt":"2021-12-23T13:25:51","slug":"going-serverless-the-easy-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/devops\/cloud\/going-serverless-the-easy-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Going serverless, the easy way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Serverless<\/strong> is one of the (not so) new buzzword in town and it has been gaining a lot of attention lately. Cloud vendors are pushing this technology as much as they can, presenting it as the ultimate way to easily implement complex applications without the typical burdens of system administration. No OS friction, hardware management, scalability issues. No \u201cservers\u201d to manage, update, replace. The cloud provider takes care of all of it, letting the developers be free to focus on what really matters, aka developing their application, instead of wasting their energy in the infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Aside from the marketing hype, serverless architectures are a very interesting approach to the ageless dilemma of finding the perfect balance when splitting energies between application development and infrastructure management<\/strong>. That is probably the reason why serverless is so popular, not only on public clouds, but also on-premises.<\/p>\n

During Codemotion Milan 2019<\/a><\/b>, Alex Casalboni<\/b>, Sr. Technical Evangelist with Amazon Web Services<\/strong>, delivered a speech titled Advanced Serverless Architectural Patterns on AWS<\/em>. In this article we will learn the basics of serverless technology provided by AWS<\/abbr>.<\/p>\n

If you want to learn more about serverless (even if with different technologies), do not miss the opportunity to attend Codemotion Berlin 2019<\/a><\/strong>! Check the agenda<\/a> and particularly the talk by Ivan Culjak<\/a>: tickets are still available, get yours here<\/a><\/strong>!<\/p>\n

A service without a server<\/h2>\n

For the sake of clarity, let\u2019s re-state the obvious: serverless doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t servers involved (and how that could possibly be?). It simply means that the infrastructure that runs the application (or a part of it) is transparent to the developer.<\/p>\n

Instead of deploying a whole microservice, a module or even an entire application as a container, deployment in a serverless environment is done by providing functions, pieces of code that the cloud provider will instantiate when needed. This execution model is often referred to as Function as a Service<\/b> (FaaS<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

Depending on the provider, functions can be implemented in a variety of programming languages such as JavaScript<\/strong>, Python<\/strong>, Java<\/strong>, Go<\/strong>, Ruby<\/strong>, C#<\/strong> and more.<\/p>\n

Amazon was among the first cloud providers to offer a FaaS service with its well known AWS Lambda<\/b> service. AWS Lambda is an event-driven serverless platform that allows the execution of code in response to predefined events. Lambda takes care of instantiating and managing the computing resources needed to execute the serverless code, scaling them automatically when needed.<\/p>\n

The serverless Hello World<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s dive in the serverless world creating our first AWS Lambda function. Anyone can experiment with AWS Lambda for free, since the Lambda free tier does not expire and is immediately available after signing up, provided that our application does not perform more than 1 million requests per month or uses more than 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month.<\/p>\n

After signing in the AWS Management Console, we are greeted with a list of wizards that can help getting started setting up the services we need.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s click on the \u201cDeploy a serverless microservice<\/b>\u201d wizard to create our simple serverless Hello World example.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>The wizard is based on a blueprint, a template for our microservice: a simple REST endpoint to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on a DynamoDB database. We will modify this template according to our needs, removing the connection to DynamoDB and simply returning an Hello World message instead.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s fill in the details of our new lambda function, assigning the name \u201cmyHelloWorld\u201d and creating a new security role for it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>
\nSince we will not actually connect to DynamoDB, we can remove this policy from the execution role by clicking on the little X on the policy block.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s proceed with the API gateway trigger. This trigger will execute the lambda function whenever the API endpoint is reached.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s choose to create a new API, set its security to \u201cOpen\u201d so we can call the endpoint without authentication (just for the sake of the example) and assign a name to it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After that, just scroll to the end of the page and click on the \u201cCreate function\u201d button. We will modify the code our lambda function immediately after.<\/p>\n

<\/center>When AWS has finished creating the Lambda function, its code will be presented in the inline editor. Just replace the code with the following:<\/p>\n