We love Serverless technology here at Boyle Software – being able to build applications comprised of microservices, which run in response to events, auto-scaling, being able to focus on the business problems rather than infrastructure, lower costs etc – the list goes on.
A couple of months ago you might remember Lev Gimelfarb gave us a tech talk on Stacy where he used Amazon Web Services (AWS) Api Gateway and Lambdas to build a dynamic website.
Sometimes though, we have found that organizing , configuring and and deploying components and services within the AWS ecosystem can be a bit manual and daunting.
Enter “The Serverless Framework.”
Billed as the “world’s leading development framework for building serverless architectures” , and offering “structure, automation and best practices out-of-the-box, allowing you to focus on building sophisticated, event-driven, serverless architectures, comprised of Functions and Events.“ , it has been garnering a lot of attention over the past year and even got a mention on Forbes.
So why use the Serverless Framework?
- Provision and deploy a REST API, data pipe-line, or one of many other use cases in minutes
- CLI makes it simple to manage and build a serverless architecture by abstracting away provider-level complexity
- Pay when your code runs, so you never have to worry about paying for idle server time
- Flexible application structure for easy management of code, resources, and events across large projects & teams
- Serverless is an MIT open-source project, actively maintained by a vibrant and engaged community of developers
- Framework users are reacting to billions of events per month on AWS Lambda infrastructure
Recently we gave ‘TSF’ a whirl to build a proof of concept for a client and were suitably impressed.
From orchestrating our Api Gateway and Lambda functions with Simple Notification System (SNS) and Simple Queue System (SQS), The Serverless Frameowork makes things really neat and simple through the use of its serverless.yaml configuration file and command line interface (CLI).
It also supports multiple languages (Node.js, Python, Java, and more) and has a fully extensible plugin system so now you really have no more excuses for not building your next killer Alexa app.
If all that didn’t sound good enough, you might also be interested to know that as of v1.14 which was released at the end of May 2017 , TSF now supports Google Cloud Functions too!
Give it a try ..
Some good references for anyone wanting to get started:
https://serverless.com/framework/
https://www.manning.com/books/serverless-architectures-on-aws
https://github.com/pmuens/serverless-book