As developers, our job has changed a great deal. Infrastructures have moved from on-premise servers to virtual machines, and are now hosted on Cloud instances. We now talk about Serverless Development. But the developer’s job has not become more complex for all that. Quite the opposite.
Fundamentally, with the Cloud, the way of programming changes so as to concentrate on the essentials. The revolution lies in the architecture of projects, now oriented towards microservices.
Thanks to these microservices, or more broadly to serverless, you use ready-to-use code and basic services. You therefore devote yourself solely to the added value of your project, and so of your code and the associated features. Enough to save you time, ensure the quality of the code, and push you to rethink our business with more of a focus on innovation.
If you are a developer, or a project owner, discover the many advantages this architecture offers.
Microservices and serverless development to …
… Focus better on the core of your application
When you deploy a solution on an on-premise server or on a virtual machine, your team of developers takes care of coding everything: the functions specific to your application, as well as the secondary but essential functions such as user management, the database connection, and so on. This is what we call a monolithic architecture.
By contrast, by deploying a solution on the Cloud with serverless development, you can concentrate mainly on the native functions of your application. Connected online, you have access to a wealth of managed services for the basic functions. On AWS, for example, a multitude of microservices are available to build a serverless architecture. They let you deploy universal features very quickly, such as “IAM” to manage the security policy for your users, “ Cognito” to secure their authentication and manage your users, “Lex” to create Chatbots, “Simple Email Service” to send emails from your application, and so on.
It would take far too long to list them all. AWS creates dozens of them every year. Its catalogue contains more than a hundred of them, around themes linked to compute, data storage, analytics, the security of your applications, the Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and so on.
Discover them here: https://aws.amazon.com/fr/products/?nc2=h_ql_prod
… More agility and time saved
Clearly, by concentrating on the native functions of your application and by using these managed services, you reduce the development time of your web projects.
Moreover, since your serverless architecture is split into services, you can share out the implementation of each function between developers. Each of them can program independently, without having to know the code structure of the other parts of the application. Your project manager will simply have to run integration tests to check that everything works together.
… Make your application easier to evolve
Thanks to this split into microservices, thanks to serverless, you can evolve your solution more easily. Changing a feature will require work on a single service, without having to check the whole application again.
What is more, by using these managed services, you gain easier access to the new features offered by the Cloud provider. For example, if you use Cognito to manage access to your application, your users initially logged in with a login and a password. When that service evolved, you were able to put in place two-factor authentication very easily.
… And more scalable
On the Cloud, thanks to serverless development, a company can better adjust its resource needs, whether upwards or downwards. It therefore has better control over its consumption and pays only for what it consumes online.
On AWS, the services are managed. The elasticity of your applications is handled automatically by the Cloud Provider. It adjusts the capacity that needs to be maintained at any given moment according to the performance recorded. Your application therefore remains optimally available even if there are sudden changes in workload.
… Better quality code
As part of serverless development, each service provides a function, and therefore code that has been extensively tried and tested and verified by the Cloud providers. Which guarantees you good quality code.
What is more, since your application is divided into micro-modules, bug hunting is much easier. So is maintenance!
… With built-in monitoring tools
That said, this quality does not remove the need to monitor your solutions. On AWS, “Amazon CloudWatch” allows your resources and your applications to be monitored by collecting operational data in the form of logs, metrics or events. The aim: to make sure that everything is working properly. And since we work in microservices, if one of them fails, we can easily replace it with another.
… More resilience
The independence of each function considerably increases the resistance of your application to possible failures. If an incident occurs on one of the functions you have developed (so outside the AWS services), it will not make the application unavailable. In that case, only the function in question will be interrupted temporarily.
… To reduce costs
Since serverless development works on a pay-per-use basis, you can perfectly well test them to develop new offers. You can then see whether it meets a demand from your clients, and adapt or adjust your proposal without it costing you far too much.
Finally, developers who are experts in microservices take far less time to create an application. Serverless therefore requires fewer resources and fewer developers.
So, if you want to launch an application quickly and adopt this type of architecture, surround yourself with specialists.
The team at Premaccess supports many companies that have taken the serverless step.
… More innovation, of course!
More generally, with serverless architecture, we have to think harder about the structure of our applications before starting to develop them.
For any developer, getting to grips with the Cloud and microservices calls for a new approach to the job. What should I code myself? What should I program from a managed service? How is the interface organised between these different functions?
This new architecture undoubtedly shortens development cycles considerably. An observation that should push us to reinvent our businesses, to rethink our added value and the differentiating elements that our applications bring in terms of innovation.
As a developer or project manager, if you would like support when creating an application on the Cloud, do not hesitate to contact the Premaccess team. It will advise you step by step, and will present the strengths of managed services for making your project innovative and able to evolve.
The AWS services mentioned in this article: