Summary

In this chapter, we first described the journey from traditional to serverless software development. We discussed how software development has changed over the years to create a more developer-friendly environment. Following that, we presented the origin of serverless technology and its official manifesto. Since serverless is a popular term in the industry, defining some rules helps to design better serverless applications that integrate easily into various platforms. We then listed use cases for serverless technology to illustrate how serverless architectures can be used to create any modern application.

Following an introduction to serverless, FaaS was explored as an implementation of serverless architectures. We showed how applications are designed in traditional, microservices, and serverless designs. In addition, the benefits of the transition to serverless architectures were discussed in detail.

Finally, Kubernetes and serverless technologies were discussed to show how they support each other. As the mainstream container management system, Kubernetes was presented, which involved looking at the advantages of running serverless platforms with it. Containerization and microservices are highly adopted in the industry, and therefore running serverless workloads as containers was covered, with exercises. Finally, a real-life example of functions as a backend for a Twitter bot was explored. In this activity, functions were packaged as containers to show the relationship between microservices-based, containerized, and FaaS-backed designs.

In the next chapter, we will be introducing serverless architecture in the cloud and working with cloud services.