chapter five

5 Serverless Made Easy

 

This chapter covers:

  • Deploying a serverless web application in Azure
  • Design patterns for Terraform modules
  • Downloading arbitrary code with Terraform
  • Combining Terraform with Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Serverless is one of the biggest marketing gimmicks of all time. It seems like everything is marketed as “serverless”, despite nobody being able to agree on what the word even means. One thing for sure is that serverless does not refer to the elimination of servers; in fact, it usually means the opposite, since distributed systems often involve way more servers than traditional system design.

One thing that can be agreed on is that serverless is not one technology, it’s a suite of related technologies sharing two key characteristics:

  1. pay-as-you-go billing
  2. minimal operational overhead

Pay-as-you-go billing is about paying for the actual quantity of resources consumed, rather than pre-purchased units of capacity (i.e. pay for what you use, not what you don’t use). Minimal operational overhead means that the cloud provider takes on most or all of the responsibility of scaling, maintaining and managing the service.

5.1    The “Two Penny Website”

5.2    Architecture and Planning

5.2.1   Sorting by Group, then by Size

5.3    Writing the Code

5.3.1   Resource Group

5.3.2   Storage Container

5.3.3   Storage Blob

5.3.4   Function App

5.3.5   Final Touches

5.4    Deploying to Azure

5.5    Combining Azure Resource Manager (ARM) with Terraform

5.5.1   Deploying Unsupported Resources

5.5.2   Migrating from Legacy Code

5.5.3   Generating Configuration Code

5.6    Fireside Chat

5.7    Summary