By CIOReview | Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Some of the most important serverless challenges for DevOps teams include the complexity of serverless monitoring, security concerns in serverless architectures, and cost management. 

FREMONT, CA: Serverless computing is a model where the cloud provider dynamically allocates resources. The term ' serverless' may be deceptive because it does not imply that no servers are involved. Instead, it implies that developers no longer need to consider servers, even though they are running on them.

The goal is to abstract away the infrastructure, enabling developers to focus only on the code. HTTP requests, database events, queuing services, monitoring alerts, file uploads, scheduled events (cron tasks), and user sign-ups or in-app actions all cause functions or units of code to be executed.   

The importance of serverless for DevOps teams: Serverless computing represents a radical shift in the way applications are designed, deployed, and managed, with immediate implications for DevOps teams. The primary benefit of serverless for these teams is a large decrease in operational overhead. With serverless, the cloud provider runs the server, ensures its reliability, and expands the infrastructure. This relieves DevOps teams of the mundane responsibilities of server deployment, maintenance, and patching, allowing them to focus on optimizing the application's code and business logic.

Significant serverless challenges of DevOps teams are noted below:

Security concerns in serverless architectures: Security is a primary concern for any DevOps team. Serverless architectures provide companies with less control over the underlying infrastructure, making it more difficult to secure the security of their applications.

Understanding the shared responsibility concept is the first step toward securing serverless applications. The cloud provider protects the infrastructure in a serverless environment, but companies must secure their code and settings. This implies that they should pay close attention to input validation, error handling, and secure setup methods.

Another important feature of serverless security is permission management. Each function should have the fewest rights required to complete its task. This can be performed by using the cloud provider's identity and access management (IAM) capabilities. 

The complexity of serverless monitoring: The biggest challenge in the serverless era is the complexity of monitoring, unlike traditional designs, which allow businesses to monitor real or virtual servers, serverless require them to monitor individual operations. This can be challenging because they may have hundreds or even thousands of functions executing at the same time.

To properly monitor serverless infrastructures, business owners must go beyond typical approaches. They need technologies that can deliver function-level insights. These tools let them track metrics like execution time, error rates, and invocation counts for each of their routines.