Preface

I still remember the first time I learned about AWS Lambda, shortly after its general availability. My introduction to and interest in the serverless world was triggered by it. What started as a casual experiment of a niche cloud service soon turned into a journey of exploring serverless as a computing paradigm and how to fit more business use cases into it. As months and years went by, more vendors started rolling out their own Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) alternatives as well as other serverless backends. It was an amazing evolution that brought in a new era of cloud computing.

As exciting as it is, with the explosion of serverless technologies and vendors, it has become challenging to even comprehend the foundational services and what they have to offer. With the era of hybrid cloud, it is not necessary to stick to one cloud vendor and their serverless platforms. You can do your due diligence and mix and match the services from different vendors or even build a private serverless cloud. But to make those decisions, it is vital to know about the choices you have across the vendors and open source technologies of serverless. While there is extensive documentation that each of these vendors supply, there was no one place from where an engineer could understand the basics of serverless offerings across the spectrum. This book is written with that audience in mind.

This book lays a strong foundation for serverless landscape and technologies in a vendor-agnostic manner. You’ll learn how to select the different cloud vendors and technology as per your needs. You’ll deep dive into the serverless services across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, and Cloudflare, followed by open source serverless tools such as Knative, OpenFaaS, and OpenWhisk, along with their examples. You’ll explore serverless solutions on Kubernetes that can run on cloud-hosted clusters and on-premises with the help of real-world use cases. You’ll be able to extend your learnings by understanding the development frameworks, DevOps approaches, best practices, security, and design principles of serverless.

By the end of this serverless book, you’ll be equipped with the skills required to solve your business problems by using the appropriate serverless vendors and technologies and build efficient and cost-effective serverless systems on your own.