Serverless has the potential to bring massive ops advantages to projects of all sizes, but while it presents great business benefits, we need to spare a thought for how teams develop on serverless. I recently published ‘Serverless Development is Broken’ a list of concerns about how developers can work with long deploy times inherent in a cloud-only code environment.

When it comes to cloud strategy, companies rank “cutting costs” as their top priority for 2019, according to a recent Datamation survey. That’s not to say that they plan to cut back on cloud spending in general; in fact, those budgets are very much expected to grow. Rather, companies are looking for ways to reduce unnecessary costs and optimize cloud spend.

An ever increasing number of developers and architects are using AWS Lambda to deploy serverless functions to control costs and reduce the burden of server management. Due to the unpredictable nature of end-user demand in today’s digital-first world, Lambda functions can help resolve unplanned scaling issues.

AWS has 21 (and counting!) geographic regions. If you never use one or more of those regions, detecting activity in those regions is critical for your cloud security posture.

Amazon has enabled a great new feature for cloud security: Default Encryption for New EBS Volumes. When enabled in a region, any new EBS volume that is created will automatically by encrypted with the configured KMS key. At first glance, this sounds great. However, here there be monsters, as the saying goes, if you are copying EBS snapshots or AMI images across AWS accounts.

In the era of cloud-based architectures, companies have implemented multiple cloud platforms but have yet to reap the full benefits. Whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure (or some combination thereof), a recent Forrester study found that nearly 86 percent of enterprises have incorporated a multi-cloud strategy.

This is the first of a two-part blog series. In this post we’ll use Stackery to configure and deploy a serverless data processing architecture that utilizes AWS Step Functions to coordinate multiple steps within a workflow. In the next post we’ll expand this architecture with additional workflow logic to highlight techniques for increasing resiliency and reliability.