Porting to serverless

Unless you have the luxury of building your application from scratch, chances are you’ll face a point where you’ll have to decide on a strategy for migrating your application to a serverless/functions-as-a-service (FaaS) architecture. While some considerations, like support for your application’s language and runtime version, are fairly straightforward, your overall strategy will probably depend on a number of factors including your application’s maturity, architecture, and framework.

If you’ve already servicified your application, including decoupling independent functionality, you’re likely in a good position to begin a serverless migration. Typically, you’ll identify a relatively low-risk service to migrate and build confidence and experience with your new FaaS infrastructure. Good candidates for testing serverless architectures are background task queues and internal analytics services which store data for retrieval at a later time.

While this is a relatively simple starting point, you may need to put some consideration into how your service will handle state and how service discovery will work within your distributed system. As you build success with individual services, the task of bringing over the entirety of the application should get easier.

If your application is predominately an API, you’re in luck — FaaS architecture is well-suited to API use cases. You have at least two reasonable paths forward for an API migration: decompose your API to individual functions or port your API framework.

Decomposing your API is easy enough; define your routes and connect them to individual functions. This works well if your functions are reasonably transactional and don’t require much interdependency, but it can also be time consuming to break apart your application in this way and increases the complexity of deploying and updating your API.

If your goal is to bring a legacy or monolithic application to a FaaS provider, you’re likely in for a bit of a challenge. While it may be theoretically possible to load certain applications in Lambda, it’s likely that the resource requirements, cold boot times, and architectural differences of FaaS infrastructure will make this approach all but impossible.

There are a number of pragmatic paths to migrating your applications onto serverless infrastructure. Each come with their own considerations, limitations, and with various levels of effort. Organizations making this switch often find that their applications become easier to maintain, quicker to update, and have significantly better infrastructure cost models. In general, the transition is easier than you might expect and gets faster after a little initial experience.

Related posts:

Your pet is a very intelligent animal and good dog training skills would ensure that he/she is well-trained. You can make your buddy do just about anything with some time and effort. Patience is the…

We are very excited to announce the launch of Energi Bridge on our mainnet! It is fully operational and ready to bring your ERC-20 tokens across from the Ethereum network to Energi. This is a huge…

I will provide high quality and fully functional WordPress website services according to your requirements. If you are want something that is not included in my gig, please contact me and let’s have…