[Music] Welcome to “The Serverless Stack” After watching this video, you will be able to: Describe why FaaS is a foundational technology in the serverless stack. Summarize how object storage serverless framework, and explain how event streaming, messaging, and API gateways fit in the serverless stack Serverless is a set of common attributes. Serverless is not an explicit technology. Therefore, many technologies are considered serverless since they possess shared characteristics, such as pay-per-use and no infrastructure management. Function-as-a-service is one example of serverless technology. That’s why FaaS seems so much like serverless—because FaaS is ultimately an implementation of serverless attributes. FaaS is an excellent example of serverless. FaaS is widely understood as the originating technology in the serverless category. FaaS represents the core compute and processing engine in serverless and sits in the center of most serverless architectures. To illustrate that concept, consider that functions can perform custom logic and fire in response to events generated by other services in the stack. However, there are also other technologies in the serverless stack. Like other architectures, serverless architectures have a data layer for any data persisted by the applications. Databases and storage are the foundation of the serverless data layer. A serverless approach to these technologies involves transitioning away from provisioning “instances” with defined capacity, connection, and query limits and moving toward models that scale linearly with demand, in both infrastructure and pricing. To explain the database layer with a bit more detail, organizations that use a traditional server environment often provision a specific database, or multiple instances of that database, on servers in a datacenter. In that situation, the size of the servers limits the size of the database. The organization must pay for that server whether the server is full of data or contains only a small amount of data. Limiting capacity and disregarding usage is clearly incompatible with a serverless model in which storage capacity is not limited, and you pay only for exactly what you use. The next part of the serverless stack is object storage. Object storage is part of the serverless databases and storage section of the serverless stack. Much of today’s internet communications data is dominated by mostly unstructured data, including email, videos, photos, audio files, and other items. You can’t easily store unstructured data in traditional relational databases. Object storage, a prime example of serverless storage, is a storage architecture that can handle large amounts of unstructured data. Efficiently storing and managing this unprecedented volume of data is becoming a more crucial task every year, and object storage offers scalability that’s unavailable using traditional block or file storage. Here’s how object storage works. Objects are discrete units of data. Object storage does not have a hierarchy like a directory system; instead, each object is a self-contained repository that contains the data, metadata, and a unique identifier that applications use to access the object. These self-contained repositories result in a flat structure that is highly scalable in comparison to relational databases. The next ring in the serverless stack is event streaming and messaging. Serverless architectures are well-suited for event-driven and stream-processing workloads, which involves message queue integration, most notably Apache Kafka. Microservices need to communicate with each other, which often occurs using messaging queues. Having functions that can respond to new events or messages is crucial for a robust serverless architecture. The final attribute of the serverless stack consists of API gateways. API gateways act as proxies to web actions and provide HTTP method routing, client ID and secrets, rate limits, and more. In other words, HTTP events often trigger functions. For instance, a POST request to the endpoint for a function might trigger the function to perform a specific action. An API gateway can expose the HTTP method route so that the API is accessible to other services. In this video, you learned that: serverless is a set of attributes and not a single technology, FaaS exists as the core compute and processing engine for most serverless architectures, serverless storage is ready-made for the internet age, and messaging and API gateways provide crucial capabilities for a robust serverless application.
