Building Serverless Applications with Python

Jalem Raj Rohit

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787281134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Software Development
• Index: Computer Science

Building efficient Python applications at minimal cost by adopting serverless architecturesAbout This Book• Design and set up a data flow between cloud services and custom business logic• Make your applications efficient and reliable using serverless architecture• Build and deploy scalable serverless Python APIsWho This Book Is ForThis book is for Python developers who would like to learn about serverless architecture. Python programming knowledge is assumed.What You Will Learn• Understand how AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure Functions work and use them to create an application• Explore various triggers and how to select them, based on the problem statement• Build deployment packages for Lambda functions• Master the finer details about building Lambda functions and versioning• Log and monitor serverless applications• Learn about security in AWS and Lambda functions• Scale up serverless applications to handle huge workloads and serverless distributed systems in production• Understand SAM model deployment in AWS LambdaIn DetailServerless architectures allow you to build and run applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. Many companies have adopted this architecture to save cost and improve scalability. This book will help you design serverless architectures for your applications with AWS and Python.The book is divided into three modules. The first module explains the fundamentals of serverless architecture and how AWS lambda functions work. In the next module, you will learn to build, release, and deploy your application to production. You will also learn to log and test your application. In the third module, we will take you through advanced topics such as building a serverless API for your application. You will also learn to troubleshoot and monitor your app and master AWS lambda programming concepts with API references. Moving on, you will also learn how to scale up serverless applications and handle distributed serverless systems in production.By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the knowledge required to build scalable and cost-efficient Python applications with a serverless framework.Style and approachThe book takes a pragmatic approach, using a real-world example to demonstrate building efficient, secure, and scalable serverless applications.

Logging and Monitoring

We have learned about the concepts of serverless architectures and understood the basics and the internals of AWS's serverless service, AWS Lambda. We have also created some example serverless projects to understand the concepts better. During the course of our learning, we have also learned the basics of several other AWS services, such as alarms, SNS, SQS, S3 buckets, and CloudWatch.

In this chapter, we will learn about how to do the logging and monitoring for the serverless systems that we are building. Logging and monitoring software code and systems are very important, as they helps us with the telemetry and disaster recovery. Logging is a process where we store the logs emitted by our code or by our architecture as a whole. Monitoring is a process where we closely monitor the activities, status, and health of the components and processes in our code or architecture.

So, you will be learning how to set up and understand the monitoring suite of AWS Lambda, which is closely integrated with the monitoring service of AWS, the CloudWatch Dashboards. We will also learn about the logging service of AWS, the CloudWatch Logs service. Finally, we will also learn about and understand the distributed tracing and monitoring service of AWS, the CloudTrail service.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Understanding CloudWatch
• Understanding CloudTrail
• Lambda's metrics in CloudWatch
• Lambda's logs in CloudWatch
• Logging statements in Lambda

Understanding CloudWatch

As mentioned earlier, CloudWatch is the logging and monitoring service of AWS. We have already looked at and learned about the CloudWatch Alarms, which are a sub-feature of CloudWatch. We will now learn about the graphing suite of the service. Almost every service in the AWS environment has a way to send it's logs and metrics to CloudWatch for logging and monitoring purposes. Each service might have several metrics which can be monitored, depending on the function.

Similarly, AWS Lambda also has some metrics, such as the invocation count, the invocation's running time, and so on, which it sends to CloudWatch. It is also helpful to note that the developers can also send custom metrics to CloudWatch. So in the following steps, we shall be learning about the different parts and functions of AWS CloudWatch corresponding to AWS Lambda:

1. Firstly, let us see what the CloudWatch console looks like and also get a feel for it by navigating around the console. Browse to console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/:

2. As we can see, there is a lot of information in the CloudWatch console. So, we shall now ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Packt Upsell
• Contributors
• Preface
• The Serverless Paradigm
• Building a Serverless Application in AWS
• Setting Up Serverless Architectures
• Deploying Serverless APIs
• Logging and Monitoring
• Scaling Up Serverless Architectures
• Security in AWS Lambda
• Deploying a Lambda Function with SAM
• Introduction to Microsoft Azure Functions
• Other Books You May Enjoy