Software Architecture Design Patterns for Serverless System

Since the concept of a “serverless” system is gaining traction, you’re likely to develop curiosity in this regard. But, it isn’t a big deal to understand the reasons for it. With an assurance of flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, the serverless system brings a paradigm shift in the software development arena. 

As more and more users tend to go with serverless architecture, the need for efficacious serverless design patterns is getting higher and higher day in and day out. Design patterns happen to be reusable solutions to most of the common problems.  

They’re likely to guide you through developing an architecture for scalable and reliable serverless software solutions. Excellent design helps you simply handle distributed data, manage states, and maintain security. So, in this article, we’ll explore software architecture design patterns for serverless systems. 

Let’s dig deeper!

Software Architecture Patterns: A Brief Introduction

Software architecture is one of the significant elements of software development, which ensures a flawless data flow as well as correlation between program structure and data. When an intact software architecture pattern gets implemented, the chances for software to remain reliable, efficient, and updated grow. 

The software architecture pattern is more about design related to the behavior and structure of the entire system. It tends to function as an architectural pattern of a building that includes walls, floors, and rooms, making these all work together. When it comes to software development, the architecture pattern shows engineers the way to create robust and maintainable software solutions.

An Overview of Serverless Architecture

Serverless architecture happens to be a cloud computing model that simplifies the server management process by providing required machine resources automatically. Reduced operational cost, cost efficiency, scalability, and the like are some of the advantages of it. Automated scaling of resources as per the demand ensures ample use of resources during the loading period. 

Furthermore, pay-as-you-go pricing models tend to provide you with considerable cost savings — as users are bound to pay only for the specific computing time they consume. Since the server management tasks get handled by the cloud service provider, you’re more likely to spend your time enhancing your app’s quality and adding value to users. With this, you experience timeless development cycles and enhanced quality of the products.

Software Architecture Patterns for Serverless System

Now that we’ve understood the basics let’s explore the Software Architecture Patterns for serverless systems so that you can get the most out of your next project! 

Event-Driven Architecture

EDA (event-driven architecture) is one of the design patterns that’s an ideal alternative for serverless applications — it allows systems to respond to real-time apps and software solutions. The very design patterns make use of resources only when issues occur. In consequence, in a serverless environment where functions should react to events, for instance, sensor outputs and user actions, the event-driven architecture allows comprehensive scalability and efficiency. 

Event-driven architecture tends to process events independently. Events instantly invoke the associate function and make sure to trigger real-time responses, making event-driven architecture an ideal substitute for apps in need of prompt actions. Furthermore, it separates components to make the system flexible and more maintainable. These pluses make the EDA a beneficial and wise choice for a variety of areas, including real-time data processing, notification systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the like.

Strangler Pattern

The strangler pattern is one of the design patterns used to migrate legacy systems to a serverless architecture. With this system, you’re capable of incrementally developing serverless components around your current software, each handling particular functions and features. As you move on to adding serverless components, you’ll gradually be phasing out the old system, ensuring a refactoring procedure that’s less likely to be disruptive. You can make use of the strangler pattern to launch new improvements and features gradually; by resting and enhancing them, you replace the corresponding existing components.     

By employing the Strangler pattern, you mitigate risks and ensure a flawless transition. The very design is advantageous for organizations with monolithic apps–as a complete recreation for a serverless system may be time-consuming and full of risks. With this system, it gets way more convenient. Strangler pattern is an excellent choice for app modernization and migration. It offers a systematized approach to migrating existing software solutions into serverless architecture than any pattern except it.

Saga Pattern

The saga interaction pattern, or the saga pattern, is a software architecture designed for serverless systems to manage complex and distributed transactions. The design is secure, specifically when a sequence of local transactions creates a global transaction where data consistency across the transaction becomes essential. It becomes even more significant with potential partial failures. The saga pattern separates a significant global transaction into different tiny ones related to local transactions. 

Each of the local transactions updates data in a special service and indicates its completion. In case all the local transactions succeed, the global transactions tend to succeed. If a local transaction fails, it executes compensating transactions or rollbacks intending to maintain data consistency. If your business procedure involves multiple services and steps, this pattern will be advantageous for you. Take an example of an e-commerce application; an order is more likely to include inventory reduction, successful payment processing, as well as shipping. In case the payment fails, the system does reverse the inventory reduction.
Pub-Sub Pattern

The next software architecture pattern for the serverless system we’ve is the “(Pub-Sub) publish-subscribe Pattern .” The very pattern happens to be a messaging model for serverless software architecture that tends to decouple event publishers from subscribers. In this design, publishers develop an event and send it to a message broker with no information regarding subscribers. On the other hand, subscribers get an event they’ve subscribed to without even knowing who the publisher is. A message broker sends the messages right from publishers to their deserving subscribers.  

The alternative to decoupling eases the process of separating tasks into pieces that are independently and easily manageable parts, improving flexibility as well as reliability. For example, you’re capable of adding and removing subscribers, leaving no impact on the publishers. Moreover, if you fail to send the message to a subscriber, the message broker will be capable of retrying the delivery. Hence, the pub-sub pattern is advantageous in messaging systems like chat apps, in which various subscribers tend to receive the same equal messages.  

Fan-Out/Fan-In Pattern

The fan-out/fan-in software architecture design pattern allows parallel processing and integration. It can be an ideal alternative to conduct operations on a variety of data segments independently. The pattern divides inputs into various independent subtasks, which streamlines execution time for large tasks. It creates various functions as the workload increases and leads to excellent scalability based on demand, better use of resources, as well as enhanced cost efficiency. 

The fan-out/fan-in design pattern is excellent for various processes like data processing pipelines, distributed computing, batch processing, and the like. As far as data processing is concerned, it separates large volumes of data into tiny chunks aimed at ensuring parallel processing. Hence, it allows synchronous processing of the multitude of images and video frames while mitigating processing time. When there are distributed tasks, for instance, Monte Carlo simulations or genetic algorithms, the process of computations tend to happen in various function instances, ensuring streamlined result.

Signing Off….! 

In this rapidly growing world of modern software development, serverless architecture has emerged as one of the popular choices for a few reasons. The reasons can be, for instance, that it offers reduced operational cost while ensuring better scalability and functionality, and the like. Through this article, we discussed and tried to explore the top software architecture design patterns for serverless systems. Hopefully, you’ll find this article helpful in your attempt at software design and development.