Developers across the globe have the ability to run applications in production without needing to worry about servers thanks to serverless applications. Serverless is a fairly broad term that encompasses quite a few different things. However, in the world of development, it refers to applications that have the ability to scale automatically.
Typically, scaling an application meant costly time spent maintaining, running, and patching infrastructure core items such as servers, clusters, and load balancers. Thanks to serverless development, these worries are a thing of the past.
For some developers, building serverless applications may seem like quite a significant change from more traditional development methods. After all, it does involve adopting functional programming models, moving to microservices, and using managed services to reduce code. However, serverless apps can complement traditional application models as well as augment, integrate with, or even connect to traditional apps. This makes it a very in-demand career path and a general skill for devs of all experience levels.
Hiring Guide
In 2008, Amazon released its EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) service, which created a revolution within the world of development as it gave everyone the ability to add new server capacity to their applications on-demand. Considered the grandfather of serverless development, Amazon and other big computing companies (including Google and Microsoft) have since furthered their serverless options to what they stand as today.
Serverless is a cloud-native development model that gives developers the ability to build and run applications without having to manage or worry about servers. While there are still servers involved in serverless, they aren’t directly involved in app development. The cloud provider manages the routine maintenance, scaling, and provision of the servers while devs simply keep their code in packages for deployment.
In addition to “organic” app building and development, serverless technologies are a great way to connect applications together. Devs have the ability to rapidly create endpoints to handle inbound webhooks, run the required business logic on the webhook payload, and transfer the output result to the hooked-up server.
Serverless development is still fairly new to the world of development but is currently more in-demand than ever as it is incredibly beneficial for app owners and companies. This separation of backend needs and frontend development makes for an incredibly beneficial practice, with pros including:
- Easy DevOps adoption, thanks to the reduced need for devs to explicitly describe the provisions they require to operate.
- Streamlined app development through the incorporation of third-party BaaS products
- Increased developer productivity through the offloading of the routine tasks associated with provisioning and managing servers.
- Reduced overall operational costs as serverless models only require payment based on use, which replaces the higher costs of running and managing personal servers.
With companies always on the lookout to build new applications, serverless technologies are only going to grow in popularity as time goes on – which means the developer job market will continue to expand and grow in demand as well. Many existing developers are choosing to learn how to work with these new technologies to stay ahead of the game in their field.
Interview Questions
What are the 4 general “principles” of serverless technologies and development?
- It offers automatic scaling based on usage.
- App owners pay for value instead of simply paying for server units.
- There are no servers for developers to maintain or manage.
- It offers fault tolerance and availability as built-in aspects.
What are the 2 main types of serverless architectures?
- Backend as a Service or BaaS – This is the practice of using third-party services to get the means of production. When using BaaS, the client uses external services, such as database management, authentication, and user management, to handle business logic.
- Function as a Service or FaaS – This refers to the stateless functions used to contain business logic run on the server-side. These run in independent containers and are triggered by events.
Are serverless and containers the same thing?
Although they are very similar in many ways, serverless and containers are 2 different things. These technologies both allow developers to focus on their creativity and coding skills rather than wasting time on building infrastructure to help increase dev speed. They both are great options for microservices and component-based architecture.
Developers working in serverless architectures have the ability to release and iterate new applications quickly without worrying about scalability. Serverless is more cost-effective than containers because the code doesn’t require constant use. Containers do give developers more control over the application environment but that comes with additional maintenance and the use of languages and libraries. Containers prove useful when migrating legacy applications to the cloud.
What are some of the cons of serverless architectures?
- Serverless means working with an external provider for servers, which means some drawbacks as devs don’t run or control their own server-side logic.
- Working with an outside server source means opening up the opportunity for vendor lock-in. Should devs decide to change their provider, it will likely come with costs associated with upgrading systems to adhere to new specifications.
- Some cloud providers have strict rules for interacting with their components. This may have an effect on the flexibility and customization of a client’s system. BaaS environments are particularly affected by this as devs may not have control over some code.
Job Description
We are looking for a highly skilled serverless developer to join our expanding team. Successful applicants should have extensive experience working in serverless environments (specifically the AWS platform, Google, and Microsoft) to develop both standalone applications and integrations.
We require consistently clean, efficient coding practices with reliability, proficiency, and effectiveness as the top priorities.
Job Responsibilities
- Contribute product concepts and prototypes
- Produce new and novel advanced development, monitoring, and troubleshooting solutions for serverless architectures
- Ingest and process high volumes of payloads, logs, metrics, etc.
- Provide helpful query capabilities across logs and transactions to help both development teams and operations teams troubleshoot issues
- Perform log and transaction analysis
- Integrate serverless architectures with additional technologies and vendors
Job Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar degree
- Experience with services common to serverless architectures (AWS, API Gateway, IAM, etc)
- Extensive experience in software design and development
- Deep knowledge of data engineering and design
- Experience building REST APIs, streaming data, and other common app architectures
- Skillful experience writing streaming data applications with Java, Apache Flink, Kinesis Streams, and Data Analytics
