- Introduction
- Overview of Serverless Architecture
- Cost
- Scalability
- Availability
- Migration Considerations
- Closing
Introduction
The need to migrate from traditional architectures to serverless solutions is ever-increasing in today’s market. Companies are in search of ways to reduce cost, increase scalability, and enhance availability of their applications while still meeting their requirements. With the utility-based serverless architecture, businesses can leverage cloud computing to scale and pay only for what is used. The process of transitioning from a traditional infrastructure to a serverless model involves important steps to be performed to ensure a successful migration process. This white paper explores the best practices for migrating from traditional architectures to serverless solutions. Adopting DevSecOps principles and utilizing AWS Cloud Security services can significantly streamline this transition, ensuring secure and efficient migration.
Overview of Serverless Architecture
Serverless architecture aims to offload the burden of server provisioning and maintenance to a cloud services provider. The provider manages their infrastructure for you, without requiring you to manage the operating system, updates or constant monitoring of the app stacks. With this type of architecture, users only need to focus on coding their application and will pay for the resources used. Furthermore, they benefit from better scalability capabilities and enhanced resource utilization.
Cost
A serverless model can enable significant cost savings. Instead of being charged with a fixed monthly fee, companies are only charged for the amount of compute time used. This can result in lower costs as it eliminates the need to predict anticipated resource needs, which can often result in wasted resources or limited scalability when traditional infrastructure models are used.
Additionally, migrating to a serverless model eliminates the need for capital expenditure (CAPEX) spending associated with purchasing and managing servers in a traditional architecture. This also eliminates any costs associated with server maintenance, letting businesses focus solely on their application development. AWS Lambda’s pricing model provides a clear example of cost-effective, usage-based billing.
Scalability
Cloud computing services are inherently scalable, and when used in a serverless environment, businesses can take advantage of that scalability. With traditional infrastructure models, it can be difficult to anticipate resource needs and plan accordingly to ensure those resources are available. Since companies are only charged for what they use in a serverless model, they can quickly and easily scale up or down to meet their resource needs. Leveraging AWS’s scalable infrastructure through services like Amazon API Gateway and AWS Fargate ensures reliable performance as demand fluctuates.
Availability
High availability is critical in today’s market and serverless architectures can aid companies in achieving this. Traditional architectures can often suffer from scalability issues, resulting in potential downtime. With a serverless model, businesses don’t have to worry about constantly monitoring their application and can benefit from increased availability.
Migration Considerations
Before beginning the process of migrating from a traditional architecture to a serverless solution, some considerations should be taken into account.
The first is evaluating if the existing application is suitable for serverless. This can involve a review of the application and infrastructure, as well as performance, scalability, and cost requirements. If a serverless solution is not suitable for the application and infrastructure, other cloud-based options may be more appropriate.
Once it has been determined that serverless is a suitable architecture for the application, several steps need to be taken to migrate the application successfully. These steps should include:
- Understanding the application dependencies
- Identifying and planning changes to the system’s architecture
- Refactoring the application code
- Adopting DevSecOps practices during the refactoring phase enhances security and ensures compliance throughout the migration process.
- Managing external and internal resources
- Testing and deploying
Closing
The serverless architecture is becoming more widely adopted, as it enables businesses to reduce costs and improve the scalability, availability, and manageability of their applications. Companies should utilize best practices when migrating from a traditional infrastructure to a serverless model to ensure that the process is successful. By understanding the application and architecture, refactoring the code, managing resources, and testing and deploying the application, businesses can ensure that their transition is seamless. For tailored assistance and expertise in implementing these best practices, contact me via LinkedIn.