AWS API Gateway is a great service but can be quite expensive, and even cost-prohibitive in some cases. An Application Load Balancer is a viable alternative since it integrates seamlessly with Lambda functions and is also highly scalable and reliable. For very small traffic, API Gateway will probably be the winner, but in high-throughput cases, ALB is capable of providing up to 90% savings.
One of the benefits of Serverless architectures is the possibility of scaling applications without worrying about load balancers and clusters of servers. While services like AWS Lambda hold their promises on this area, there are usually misconceptions about how they work. It is common for developers to assume that Lambda functions can scale infinitely, at any speed, in any circumstances. Reality is quite different from that.
Technology touches almost every corner of the world economy. Even when it’s an indirect relation, in many cases tech is an essential, vital part of our societies. It just can’t fail without causing too much distress and losses. Not only financially, but especially to the human aspect.
As we all know, the on-demand capacity mode of DynamoDB is great but can be cost-prohibitive in some cases (up to seven times more expensive than the Provisioned Capacity mode). The Provisioned mode, on the other hand, shifts to the development team the burden of predicting what level of capacity will be required by the application. And it’s not quite as straightforward to achieve the same level of scalability in the Provisioned mode as we enjoy in the On-demand one.
This post was originally published in JAXenter.com. Serverless is a relatively novel concept and cloud architectural model but has been advancing very quickly over the past 5 years. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of recent changes that are likely to shape how development teams use Serverless in practice. In this article, we’ll be heavily focussing on AWS serverless services. The cloud provider has been investing heavily in the advancement of Serverless.
As a Serverless computing service, Lambda already saves hundreds of thousands of dollars for many companies out there. While traditional server-based infrastructures usually lead to overprovisioning and waste, the Serverless pay-per-use model enables cost-effective cloud spending. Nevertheless, there are still more cost-saving opportunities that many development teams miss on AWS Lambda. Optimizing Lambda functions can be time-consuming, though.
We recently wrote about whether API Gateway can act as a Load Balancer. The answer is yes and, in many cases, they are substitutes for each other. But how should we choose which one to use? In this article, we will dive into more details on how these two types of HTTP networking services compare, using the AWS services as a base level: API Gateway and Application Load Balancer (ALB). Both are highly-scalable services to a point that scalability should not be a concern for most use cases.
The most common API architecture on Serverless backends is not necessarily the most scalable and resilient option. Many developers take for granted that an AWS Lambda processing external requests will require an API Gateway endpoint connected directly to it. One of the best options to decouple a Lambda function and an API Gateway endpoint is by using an SQS queue. Requests come into API Gateway, which are sent as messages to SQS.
Roadmap.sh is a quite popular Github repo providing community-driven guidelines for professionals willing to join or develop a software career. From Backend to Fullstack to DevOps. I missed some details there about Serverless environments and thought about sparking a discussion around this. Perhaps these ideas can mature and eventually become a contribution to the repository.
