Serverless Reference Architectures

Serverless gives us the power to focus on delivering value to our customers without worrying about the maintenance and operations of the underlying compute resources. Cloud providers (like AWS), also give us a huge number of managed services that we can stitch together to create incredibly powerful, and massively scalable serverless microservices.

Almost 2 years ago now, I wrote a post on Serverless Microservice Patterns for AWS that became a popular reference for newbies and serverless veterans alike. The capabilities of serverless have changed dramatically since then, opening up a ton of new patterns and possibilities. This project is intended to capture, share, explore, and debate the patterns and practices being used in serverless production applications today.

I will be adding new patterns regularly, each with interactive architecture diagrams to help you better understand them, and sample templates for you to begin quickly implementing them in your serverless projects. This is a community effort, so contributions are welcome and greatly appreciated. Enjoy!

The Storage First Pattern

Last Updated: July 23, 2020
The Storage First Pattern allows you to reliably capture data from incoming API requests without needing a Lambda function to parse, process, transform and save the data. Under the right circumstances, this pattern can reduce latency, save money, and minimize bugs. Explore this pattern...

The Circuit Breaker

Last Updated: July 23, 2020
The Circuit Breaker pattern keeps track of the number of failed (or slow) API calls by using a cache to share the status across multiple Lambda functions. This allows you to perform load shedding when downstream services become unavailable. Explore this pattern...

The Simple Web Service

Last Updated: July 17, 2020
A basic of pattern for creating a serverless API or web service. This example uses DynamoDB as the database because it scales nicely with the high concurrency capabilities of AWS Lambda. Explore this pattern...

The Strangler Pattern

Last Updated: July 17, 2020
This pattern lets you route requests to your legacy APIs, while allowing you to direct specific routes to new serverless services as you add them. Explore this pattern...