This document discusses some challenges with serverless development including managing infrastructure as code, collaboration mechanisms, testing, and monitoring. It outlines gaps in these areas such as permission scoping when deploying infrastructure, parameterization to avoid hardcoding secrets, testing approaches, and ensuring consistent instrumentation. The author advocates using frameworks that can automate tasks like instrumentation to help address these gaps and enable high performance serverless teams through configuration management, collaboration, and consistency.

1. Is Serverless The New Swiss Cheese?
Chase Douglas, CTO, stackery.io
chase@stackery.io
@txase
MANAGING THE HOLES IN THE SERVERLESS DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE

2. My Background
• Brought Multi-Touch Input Support To
The Linux Desktop
• Technical Architect of New Relic
Browser
• CTO and Co-founder of Stackery

3. What I’ve Seen
• Business Impeded Because Infrastructure/
Processes Couldn’t Scale
• Engineering Orgs That Don’t Know What
Has Been Deployed Where
• Spent Years Figuring Out Serverless Best
Practices

4. Most Of You Have Built A Serverless App

5. Some Of You Have Deployed An App In
Production

6. If Your Team Made It To Production,
You’ve Probably Learned A Few Things

7. AWS | LAMBDA FEATURES PAGE
AWS Lambda invokes your code only when
needed and automatically scales to support the
rate of incoming requests without requiring you
to configure anything. There is no limit to the
number of requests your code can handle.
The Promise:
SELF-HEALING SERVERLESS APPLICATIONS | PG2

8. AWS | LAMBDA FEATURES PAGE
The Reality:
AWS Lambda invokes your code only when
needed and automatically scales to support the
rate of incoming requests without requiring you
to configure anything. There is no limit to the
number of requests your code can handle.
s
architecture
sometimes
certain
s
es
every
can
but
areproperly
^
(suggested edits)
SELF-HEALING SERVERLESS APPLICATIONS | PG3

9. Serverless Powers Success

10. Serverless Development Lifecycle Gaps
• Managing Infrastructure As Code
• Collaboration Mechanisms
• Testing
• Monitoring And Instrumentation

11. Managing
Infrastructure As Code

12. Challenges
• Permission Scoping
• Parameterization
• Using Existing Resources

13. Permission
Scoping

14. HTTPS: //GITHUB.COM/SERVERLESS/EXAMPLES/BLOB/MASTER/AWS-NODE-UPLOAD-TO-S3-AND-POSTPROCESS/SERVERLESS.YML
Access To Do Anything In
Every S3 Bucket In AWS
Account!

16. Parameterization
(Or, How To Not Put Your DB
Password In Your Template)

20. Using Existing
Resources

23. Collaboration
Mechanisms

24. We’re Done Here, Right?

25. Collaboration Mechanisms
Serverless is cheap enough for every developer to
have their own application instances
Serverless local development and testing is hard
I want all my developers to be able to provision into
my team’s shared AWS account
But resources require unique names

26. Collaboration Mechanisms
Solution: Namespace resource names

27. Goal: Understand Three Things From
The Resource Name
Application
Environment
Resource

28. Stack Name: Application-Environment
+
=
backend-prod-notifications

29. Collaboration Mechanisms
My Own
Environment
=+

30. Testing

31. Testing
Serverless Does Not Change Testing!
Serverless Changes How You Run Tests

32. Testing
Unit Tests: Same As Always
System Tests: ???
Integration Tests: ???

33. Testing
System And Integration Tests: Two
Schools Of Thought
A: Always Test In The Cloud
B: Fake Services For Local Testing

34. Testing
Integration Tests In The Cloud
Pros: Faithful representation, possible
today
Cons: Slower, requires cloud access

35. Testing
Integration Tests Locally With Service Fakes
Pros: Faster, does not require cloud access
Cons: Skew in behavior vs cloud, not very well
supported today
Upstream projects are trying to make this possible/
easier (e.g. AWS SAM Local)

36. Testing
Integration Tests: Advice
(For Today Only!)
If application is only API endpoints +
Functions, do local tests
Otherwise, deploy into cloud and test

37. Testing
With The Right Approach, Serverless Is
Just As Testable As Other Architectures

38. Monitoring And
Instrumentation

39. Monitoring And Instrumentation
How We Do It Today
1. Organization picks a set of monitoring tools
2. Ask everyone to always instrument the same way
3. Pray
4. Draconian measures

41. Monitoring And Instrumentation
How We Should Do It
1. Pick a set of monitoring tools
2. Define instrumentation rules centrally
3. Framework auto-instruments every function
4. Cake

42. Monitoring And Instrumentation
How Can A Framework Auto-instrument?

43. Monitoring And Instrumentation

44. Monitoring And Instrumentation

45. Monitoring And Instrumentation
Now Just Update The Handler:
index.handler => instrumented.handler

46. Serverless Development Lifecycle Gaps
• Managing Infrastructure As Code
• Collaboration Mechanisms
• Testing
• Monitoring And Instrumentation

47. How Will You Manage The Gaps?

48. Build All The Things Yourself

49. Build All The Things Yourself

50. High Performance Serverless Teams
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT COLLABORATION CONSISTENCY

51. Use Software That Does It For You

53. Thank you!
Chase Douglas, CTO @ Stackery.io
chase@stackery.io
@txase