Introducing: The Serverless Book!

Sheen Brisals
5 min readSep 13, 2023

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The Serverless Book: Motivation

The adoption of serverless on AWS is on the rise. However, teams experimenting with serverless gradually add more and more services — motivated by their early success. While this approach works to some extent for individual contributors and small start-ups, enterprise teams need better processes and practices for a successful and sustainable serverless journey.

Serverless Development on AWS is packed with practical expertise for building enterprise-scale serverless solutions on AWS. It outlines the serverless adoption requirements in terms of people, mindset, and workloads. It details the architectural patterns, security, and data best practices for building serverless applications. Serverless as a technology is constantly evolving. This book provides practical guidance on keeping up with change and offers best practices for building serverless solutions with sustainability in mind.

The Serverless Book: Chapters

Chapter 1: Introduction to Serverless on AWS

It introduces you to the book and provides essential context behind the rise of serverless computing. You will gain an understanding of serverless, the benefits, and why businesses should consider AWS for serverless.

Chapter 2: Enterprise Readiness for Serverless

This chapter is a yardstick to measure an enterprise’s readiness to adopt serverless. It examines the changes, processes, and strategies for migrating workloads to serverless.

Chapter 3: Software Architecture for Building Serverless Microservices

It shows how to break down a problem domain into serverless microservices and why event-driven architecture is the future of building decoupled and distributed serverless applications.

Chapter 4: Serverless and Security

Explains the security principles and best practices for developing serverless applications and operating them in the cloud. It provides the measures you take before releasing your applications.

Chapter 5: Serverless Implementation Patterns

The aim of this chapter is to equip you with some of the advanced architectural and implementation patterns in serverless.

Chapter 6: Implementing Serverless Solutions

The insights readers gain from this chapter are about developing secure and resilient serverless applications by going through the development cycle that places infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and automation at the center.

Chapter 7: Testing Serverless Applications

Testing is considered one of the challenging parts of the serverless development cycle. Readers will gain a practical understanding of how to employ testing strategies in all aspects of serverless development to improve team velocity.

Chapter 8: Operating Serverless

Operating serverless at scale in an organization requires more than just logs, metrics, and traces. This chapter explains how to operate serverless services with the best observability principles and high service availability measures.

Chapter 9: Cost of Serverless Operation

This chapter addresses the operational cost of serverless development, how to estimate the cost of the core AWS services, and the awareness to make better architectural decisions and tradeoffs.

Chapter 10: Sustainability in Serverless

This chapter works on two fronts - creating sustainability awareness and showing how to apply it in serverless development.

Chapter 11: Preparing for the Future with Serverless

Serverless is an evolving technology, and this chapter offers readers practical knowledge on how to move along with the changes in serverless and grow a competent serverless community in an organization.

The Serverless Book: Features

Chapter expert Q&A

Each chapter includes a brief Q&A section at the end with a technology expert related to the topic of the chapter.

Book’s panel of chapter experts includes authors, AWS Heroes, serverless engineers, DevOps experts, and sustainability leaders.

Serverless case studies

The book contains two distinct and detailed case studies from enterprises everyone can connect with on their serverless adoption — why, how, and learnings.

The Serverless Book: Authors

Luke Hedger

Luke Hedger is a seasoned software engineer and AWS Community Builder. He has worked at all layers of the software stack, building serverless applications to state-of-the-art React apps, blockchain networks to viral marketing websites, open-source tools, and a pineapple delivery system. Luke is currently leading an engineering team building a serverless payment service platform.

Sheen Brisals

Sheen is an AWS Serverless Hero. Sheen has held several positions at leading software organizations over his long career. He is very passionate about serverless and loves sharing knowledge with the community. His writings and thoughts on serverless adoption have helped several engineers and organizations on their serverless journey. He talks about serverless at conferences around the world.

The Serverless Book: Thank You!

Luke and I would like to convey our sincere thanks to everyone connected with the work of this book. In no particular order-

All the present and future readers: One of the main motivations to write this book came from the many I was fortunate to interact with via my writings, conferences, and meetups. The AWS and Serverless communities played a major part in this process.

O’Reilly team: Everyone we have interacted with — proposal evaluation, agreement, content edits and reviews, and production work in the future.

Technical review team: We are fortunate to work with hugely respected and highly talented technology leaders as our reviewers. Thank you! from the bottom of our hearts. (We will reveal the team closer to the release).

Case study contributors: The close-knit and supportive serverless community is what made this a possibility. Their kindness and continual encouragement to contribute and see it through — we are indebted. (We will reveal the case studies and contributors closer to the release).

Work colleagues of past and present: One of our main sources of learning — from our very first job to the current one—everyone who gave us the opportunities, encouraged, trusted, and molded us into better engineers and human beings.

Family, friends, and well-wishers: To all, thank you!

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Sheen Brisals
Sheen Brisals

Written by Sheen Brisals

Co-author of Serverless Development on AWS (O'Reilly, 2024) | Engineer. Architect. Leader. Writer. Speaker. AWS Serverless Hero.