This document provides an experience report on getting serverless applications ready for production. It discusses several important considerations for production readiness including testing, monitoring and alerting, configuration management, security, and continuous integration/delivery pipelines. The document also shares lessons learned from rebuilding several services using a serverless approach at Skype and the cost savings and velocity gains achieved.
71. “…We find that tests that mock external
libraries often need to be complex to
get the code into the right state for the
functionality we need to exercise.
The mess in such tests is telling us that
the design isn’t right but, instead of
fixing the problem by improving the
code, we have to carry the extra
complexity in both code and test…”
Don’t Mock Types You Can’t Change
72. “…The second risk is that we have to be
sure that the behaviour we stub or mock
matches what the external library will
actually do…
Even if we get it right once, we have to
make sure that the tests remain valid
when we upgrade the libraries…”
Don’t Mock Types You Can’t Change
78. is our request correct?
is the request mapping
set up correctly?is the API resources
configured correctly?
are we assuming the
correct schema?
LambdaAPI Gateway DynamoDB
is Lambda proxy
configured correctly?
is IAM policy set
up correctly?
is the table created?
what unit tests will not tell you…
79.
80. most Lambda functions are simple
have single purpose, the risk of
shipping broken software has largely
shifted to how they integrate with
external services
observation
83. …if a service can’t provide
you with a relatively easy
way to test the interface in
reality, then you should
consider using another one.
Paul Johnston
84. “…Wherever possible, an acceptance
test should exercise the system end-to-
end without directly calling its internal
code.
An end-to-end test interacts with the
system only from the outside: through
its interface…”
Testing End-to-End
94. me
the earlier you consider CI/CD
the more time you save in
the long run
95. “…We prefer to have the end-to-end
tests exercise both the system and the
process by which it’s built and
deployed…
This sounds like a lot of effort (it is), but
has to be done anyway repeatedly
during the software’s lifetime…”
Testing End-to-End
139. those extra 10-20ms for
sending custom metrics
would compound when
you have microservices
and multiple APIs are
called within one slice
of user event
140. Amazon found every 100ms of latency
cost them 1% in sales.
http://bit.ly/2EXPfbA
142. console.log(“hydrating yubls from db…”);
console.log(“fetching user info from user-api”);
console.log(“MONITORING|1489795335|27.4|latency|user-api-latency”);
console.log(“MONITORING|1489795335|8|count|yubls-served”);
timestamp metric value
metric type
metric namemetrics
logs