Many people, even within the broader architectural community, struggle to grasp how to effectively utilise a rapid development approach in a serverless environment. Adrian Cockcroft has delivered outstanding talks on this subject, with this brief six-minute video being a prime example:
What is Rapid Development with Serverless? And why is it important for an Architect to understand this approach in contrast to traditional methods?
Serverless is Like Building with Interoperable Lego Blocks
Adrian discusses how cloud providers take common industry patterns and requirements, such as ‘gateways’, compute, and storage, and create Managed Services that cater to the needs of development teams. For instance, in AWS, your serverless gateway option might be an API Gateway. For serverless compute, you could use Lambda, and for persistence, you might choose DynamoDB or Aurora.
These Managed Services function as ‘Lego blocks’. Within the cloud provider ecosystem, these blocks are highly interoperable, abstract in nature (meaning you won’t know the inner workings), and usually highly configurable to meet your specific needs. You can combine these building blocks to create higher-order functions, such as a business application. For example, you could integrate an API Gateway with a Lambda function to execute logic and connect it with DynamoDB for persistence.
Receive Feedback Quickly
A team can produce a functional system within hours. Let’s delve deeper into this concept. The idea is that serverless teams are action-oriented; they assemble these Lego blocks and implement solutions through rapid development.
It’s important to understand that a serverless ecosystem is designed for rapid experimentation and feedback. Test and release cycles can be extremely short, sometimes taking only minutes. Additionally, as there is no need for provisioned physical infrastructure (owned by the team), costs are manageable and low.
Serverless teams are likely to adopt a product mindset and are better equipped to react to and pivot according to shifts in business direction. Traditional development cycles are not as conducive to experimentation and rapid feedback-driven approaches.
Embracing the Enabling Constraints
Serverless imposes constraints on teams that shape their designs and how they assemble their architectures. In traditional architectural approaches, there might be significant investment in ensuring interoperability and compatibility with open-source and COTS solutions. However, a Serverless-First approach with enabling constraints accelerates the decision-making process and allows for rapid development. These constraints guide the adoption of serverless architecture patterns, of which there are many, that teams can implement.
The rapid development approach using serverless provides teams with access to functional building blocks. Teams can benefit from principles such as interoperability, abstraction, optimised operations, and cost efficiency.
They can harness these advantages within a continuous development workflow. This approach will shift the industry’s perspective on software development and will ultimately drive the evolution towards a Serverless-First industry.
Traditional v Rapid Development
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book, The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn