Traditional OS Based Platforms
Serverless Platforms
People
Incident response focused
Building & improving self-healing applications
Process
Paper based , human executed
Automated , documented in code
Technology
High complexity , difficult transitions between technologies
Separate components for simplified technology transitions
Figure 2 : The People , Process and Technology of Serverless Computing
While serverless introduces significant new capabilities , it does require a fundamental change in how organizations deploy their operations teams and processes . Serverless computing affects many aspects of CloudOps , Security , DevOps and Financial Management & Governance . Figure 2 highlights changes that will be caused across an organization during the adoption of serverless technologies .
CloudOps
CloudOps is the operational domain that will see the largest advantage with serverless computing . Many traditional operations that consume a large percentage of time for operations teams will be eliminated , including OS monitoring & patching , disk space management , network configuration , user and host account management and application installation .
Serverless computing also removes many of the traditional tools that a system administrator or engineer would use to diagnose problems related to system performance , outages or other incidents . This does not mean events cannot be investigated , but the transient nature of the services means operations teams must use new methods to ensure logs are captured to enable full re-creation of events and incident investigation .
The central collection of logs , from all aspects of the application , outside components , external services and data layers is critical . This centralized collection enables development teams to quickly recreate events that occurred , and monitor long term trending of application behavior and performance .
Through the deployment of serverless technologies , many traditional IT tools will also require evaluation and possible replacement . Many traditional operations tools require the presence of an operating system for the execution of checks and responses . With serverless environments these checks will need to be instrumented to account for new methods of checking status , responding and evaluating service availability .
Security
Prior to the deployment of serverless computing based applications , most security organizations focus on perimeter security and access controls . Due to the deployment model of serverless , the perimeter is now an ever-changing boundary , eliminating the ability to monitor traffic and connections as usual , as well as the ability to deploy traditional security appliances . In a serverless environment , security shifts to the instrumentation of application code , enabling more complete monitoring of activities , connections and use behavior .
36 | THE DOPPLER | SPRING 2017