Faultless with serverless: Cloud best practices for optimized returns

As enterprises increasingly embrace serverless computing to build event-driven, scalable applications, the need for robust architectural patterns and operational best practices has become paramount.

Enterprises and SMEs, all share a common objective for their cloud infra – reduced operational workloads and achieve greater scalability. Since traditional monolithic architectures and server-based deployments fall short in meeting the demands of distributed systems.  

This is exactly why organizations have shown an increased inclination towards serverless computing. Interestingly, their adoption spans major sectors, including retail, BFSI, Telecom, Manufacturing, etc.

Even though serverless functions offer unparalleled flexibility and cost efficiency, they have design, state management, and cost optimization challenges.

Therefore, to harness the full potential of serverless architecture, organizations of all sizes must follow industry best practices aligned with Function-as-a-Service.

From adhering to the single responsibility principle and embracing event-driven architectures to implementing effective monitoring and error-handling strategies, a well-defined serverless approach is crucial for building highly available, resilient, and cost-effective applications at scale.

1. Separation of concerns 

The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) is an essential rule to ensure the modularity and scalability of serverless computing. According to the rule, functions should be small, stateless, and have only one primary reason to modify. Stateless functions can easily scale up or down based on demand without any overheads of managing the state.

For example, in e-commerce applications, separate, small, dedicated functions for every task such as inventory management, order processing, invoicing, etc., optimize the overall performance. 

Likewise, a social media platform could have separate functions to handle user authentication, content moderation, and push notifications. Each function should handle a specific task or domain, such as user authentication, data processing, or notification services. 

The application design principle promotes modularity and enables combining modules to build complex applications. Thus, organizations can create flexible and resilient serverless architectures. This approach ensures that functions remain focused and independent, reducing coupling and complex dependencies. Modular functions can be easily reused across different application parts, increasing code reuse and consistency. 

2. Using cost optimization tools 

Effective cost management is one of the best reasons to opt for serverless computing. Enterprises love its pay-per-use billing model; however, it can be a concern if it is not monitored aptly. 

Serverless functions are vulnerable to excessive consumption due to sudden spikes in data volume. Therefore, using cost-saving tools like timeouts and throttling in a real-time data processing pipeline makes sense. 

Next, allocating minimum memory as per the requirement and as far as workable reduces costs and optimizes the performance. A great hack to optimize function memory. For example, adjusting the memory size strictly in line with computational needs leads to significant cost savings.

Cost optimization platforms like Turbo360, RightScale, and Cloudzero can provide a comprehensive view of resource utilization and costs, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions about their serverless infrastructure. Integrating cost optimization tools helps ensure serverless applications are cost-effective, performant, and reliable, potentially saving up to 70% on infrastructure costs.

Turbo360’s integration of advanced anomaly detection algorithms and cost optimization features allows organizations to proactively identify and mitigate security threats, unusual spending patterns, and resource inefficiencies. By leveraging such capabilities, organizations can enhance their cloud security posture, optimize costs, and improve operational efficiency within their serverless environments. 

3. Asynchronous processing

An asynchronous, event-driven architecture is best suited for a serverless execution model. Serverless applications achieve resilience, scalability, and efficiency by decoupling components and handling the workloads asynchronously. The technique involves queues and event streams, where the tasks are offloaded and exclusively processed by serverless functions. 

For example, in a video transcoding service, user-uploaded videos could be placed in a queue, and serverless functions could asynchronously process them in parallel, improving overall throughput and responsiveness. Moreover, it enables parallel processing, thereby improving overall responsiveness. It lessens the impact of resource-intensive and longer-running tasks, thereby ensuring the responsiveness of critical paths. Better fault tolerance is a major differentiator here. 

4. Monitoring and observability

Any discussion around best practices is insufficient without continuous monitoring of performance, health, and behavior. Solutions like AWS X-Ray deliver deep visibility into function invocations and errors, helping proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks. 

With built-in monitoring solutions, organizations can track function invocations, durations, errors, and resource utilization. This helps them identify and resolve issues proactively and optimise opportunities. To understand this better, consider a serverless IoT platform. Through a strategic process for monitoring and observability, enterprises can remediate issues pertaining to data ingestion, processing, and delivery. This provides end-to-end data flow visibility from ingestion to processing pipelines and further to insights delivery. 

Not to miss, monitoring, can identify bottlenecks, and failures at any point thereby enabling timely and smooth repairing. 

Towards a serverless future  

Organizations that ace these industry practices will be well-positioned to lead from the front. It is a major strategic move to seek agility, scalability and cost efficiency. From separating concerns and embracing asynchronous processing to leveraging cost optimization tools and implementing robust monitoring, these approaches are essential for building highly available, resilient, and cost-effective serverless applications.

However, the evolution of serverless will also necessitate the development of new best practices to address emerging challenges, such as advanced security protocols and cross-cloud interoperability.

The dynamic digital landscape will get more complex; how prepared are you?