Top 8 mistakes developer teams make in their first serverless project
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The document outlines eight common mistakes teams make when adopting serverless architecture, emphasizing the need for infrastructure as code, effective testing, and avoiding overly complex designs. Key mistakes include relying heavily on local environments, using multi-purpose Lambda functions, and failing to leverage asynchronous communication patterns. The author suggests focusing on single-purpose functions, integration testing, and utilizing cloud resources to streamline development and improve security.
Top 8 mistakes developer teams make in their first serverless project
- 1. @paulswail 8 mistakes teams make when starting with serverless PAUL SWAIL Independent Cloud Architect, Winter Wind Software Belfast, 24th January 2020
- 2. @paulswail MISTAKE #1 AWS Console Driven Development
- 3. @paulswail ProblemsnotusingInfrastructure-as-Code ❌ Deployments not repeatable ❌ No version control of configuration changes ❌ Slow for new starts to get set up ❌ IaC seen as tool for Ops/Systems Engineers, not Developers
- 5. @paulswail MISTAKE #2 (Trying to) Run everything locally
- 6. @paulswail Usecloudresourcesindevelopmentenvironment ✓ Consistency across team ✓ Closer representation of production ✓ Fewer “worked on my machine” bugs at integration time ✓ Infrastructure-as-Code isn’t an afterthought
- 7. @paulswail PERSONALAWSACCOUNT Give each developer a sandboxed
- 8. @paulswail MISTAKE #3 Putting Lambda functions inside a VPC “for security”
- 9. @paulswail ProblemswithVPC-enabledLambdafunctions ❌ No more secure than standard IAM-protected functions ❌ Slower cold starts ❌ More network config to manage ❌ No internet access
- 10. @paulswail MISTAKE #4 The Lambda of God
- 11. @paulswail Multi-purposeLambdafunction ❌ More IAM permissions = less secure ❌ No granular deployments ❌ Larger filesize = slower cold starts ❌ Hard to find logs in CloudWatch
- 13. @paulswail MISTAKE #5 Premature abstraction into microservices
- 14. @paulswail Structuringyourfirstserverlessproject ❖ Start with a monorepo ❖ Create 1 or 2 services ❖ Don’t overly worry about code duplication
- 15. @paulswail MISTAKE #6 Testing the wrong things
- 16. @paulswail IntegrationTests>UnitTestsforLambdas 🍒 Unit tests optional nice-to-have 🔥 For each test case, write 1 test & run in 2 modes: - INTEGRATION - ACCEPTANCE (h/t Yan Cui’s Production-Ready Serverless course)
- 17. @paulswail IntegrationMode Fast workflow No mocking of cloud services
- 18. @paulswail AcceptanceMode Post deployment Runs in CI/CD pipeline Catches config errors (IAM permissions, etc)
- 19. @paulswail MISTAKE #7 Only using synchronous patterns
- 20. @paulswail Synchronousflow 👎 Slow client response time 👎 Write your own error and retry handling 👎 Complex Lambda code
- 21. @paulswail Asynchronousflow 👍 Fast API response time 👍 Uses built-in retry behaviour 👍 Single-purpose Lambda functions
- 22. @paulswail MISTAKE #8 Expecting too much from cloud services
- 23. @paulswail Selectingcloudservices… ➡ Overwhelming number of AWS services ➡ Primitive vs higher-level application services ➡ Event-driven architectures make it easy to integrate with 3rd party services
- 24. NEWSLETTER: serverlessfirst.com BLOG: winterwindsoftware.com LINKED IN: linkedin.com/in/paulswail TWITTER: @paulswail THANK YOU!