How to design Serverless Apps like a Pro using *Interactive* Serverless Reference Architectures

In order to solve tough software problems we often start with best practices for architectural patterns. Today, that means adopting a serverless approach that handles a lot of scalability and high availability concerns for you.

Adopting the latest practices in any field requires a certain amount of confidence. A completely new set of tools and understanding is required to help the next generation of teams succeed in transferring from server-centric applications to service-centric serverless applications.

While planning the #ServerlessForEveryone party at re:Invent and in the green rooms of ServerlessDays all over the globe, Jeremy Daly and I discussed how we could help enable developers to fully grasp Serverless concepts. We kept coming back to the reference architectures that he had previously created and how to make them easier to digest.

Over the past few months, Jeremy and the Stackery team have partnered together to create interactive reference architectures where folks can add resources, functions, and edit the template to see the changes. You can also deploy these patterns right into your AWS account using frameworks like SAM or Stackery. Our goal is to provide developers a clear view of the pattern fundamentals, the details of each component, and the ability to visually explore these patterns and the relationships between different AWS resources.

We hope the interactive playground will help you to grow your understanding of Serverless and how to construct individual managed services to build a complete application.

Right now, there are three reference architectures to explore with more being added every week!

The Simple Web Service

The Scalable WebHook

The Strangler Pattern

Lastly, thanks to my co-worker Danielle (and a tip from Andrew Brown), through liguid tags you can embed our visual playground on Dev, check out The Scalable Webhook below. Enjoy!

Q&A

What is Serverless?

Serverless gives us the power to focus on just the code and our data without worrying about the maintenance and configuration of the underlying compute resources.

What are Serverless patterns?

Serverless patterns represent several common microservice designs that are being used by developers on AWS.

What is the interactive reference architectures?

It makes it easy to learn and interact with architecture templates helping beginners to build like the pros and cuts learning time in half.

What is Stackery?

Stackery is like your friend who teaches you Infrastructure-As-Code, but does most of the work for you. Meanwhile, your work is always output in standard AWS SAM/CloudFormation templates and stored in your Git repo.