Serverless architecture patterns: The awkward early years

Patterns are an excellent way of building knowledge of an architectural style. And as serverless starts to mature, we start to see patterns emerge. Mike Roberts introduces you to some of these patterns and helps you look for them in your own organizations.

The last two decades have seen evolutions of software architecture—from on-premises to cloud hosted to mass-scaled microservices. While cloud native applications look very different than something we may have built before some of these techniques were well known, at their heart, they’re still long-running, custom-built server applications that orchestrate the flow of requests, data, and logic. Serverless changes all of this. You no longer build always-on server applications; you rely on events as the agents of flow rather than requests, and the server-side software that you do write may be a small aspect of your system rather than the central hub. Fundamentally, serverless is about the choreography of multiple services from multiple teams and vendors—in extreme situations—none of which you have written yourself. Mike Roberts introduces some of the patterns, or “common solutions to recurring problems,” that we’re starting to see in the serverless community. Patterns are not necessarily best practices—they’re techniques that have worked for many people but always given certain contextual constraints. You’ll learn how teams use serverless techniques to design, develop, and operate applications. And you’ll leave with a set of patterns that you can consider in your own work and a framework to use as you build a serverless pattern catalog in your organization.