The Anatomy of a Secure Serverless Platform, Pt. 2 — Development
Stackery's secure serverless platform for AWS offers teams a key resource to help realize the promise of serverless -- by automating otherwise complex infrastructure processes, we enable you to leverage the massive suite of AWS tools and services with minimal management overhead.
Stackery's serverless platform helps teams:
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Increase speed: Build and configure applications up to 60x faster.
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Reduce costs: Cut development and overhead costs by up to 90%.
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Scale effectively: Enable teams of any size to collaborate efficiently.
It's crucial for teams to do this while enforcing security and ensuring adherence to compliance guidelines. Last week we outlined how Stackey supports these goals during the design phase of building modern software architecture.
This week, let's see how this applies to the development phase of application creation.
Leveraging CloudLocal Development
For teams adopting serverless architecture, one of the biggest conceptual obstacles they face is the complexity (and sheer number) of developer workflow changes. Throughout this historically challenging process, questions often arise regarding local development support, testing against cloud resources, and maintaining a rapid iteration loop at the core of the developers' working environment.
A particular challenge here is the potential to waste many cycles waiting for new versions of code to deploy to the cloud before being run and analyzed. This cuts down on the number of code changes a developer can make in a day and results in constant context switching, not to mention great collective frustration.
For a philosophy that's supposed to advance architectural modernity, serverless development without appropriate supporting tools can sometimes seem obtuse.
Stackery addresses this challenge to almost completely eliminate the gap between your development laptop and the cloud execution environment.
The benefits of adopting CloudLocal development include:
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A tight inner iteration loop
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High consistency with the cloudside environment
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No need to maintain localhost mocks of cloudside services
In short, CloudLocal development with Stackery delivers the power of AWS straight to your laptop. Our unparalleled local development resources give your team sped-up testing loops against AWS without sacrificing security, consistency, and repeatability for your whole team.
Monolithic development on your laptop is limited by your ability to run VMs---with serverless CloudLocal via Stackery, you can execute local versions of your function code in the context of a deployed cloudside environment.
Ensuring that all aspects of the target execution environment can be faithfully reproduced, CloudLocal testing is especially important in the validation of IAM roles and permissions.
The finely-scoped configuration created during the architectural design is a critical element of the security of your new serverless application; and it must be maintained and applied consistently during the testing process.
Stackery provides a seamless query of the environment and IAM configuration directly from your cloudside development environment, avoiding the need for a local copy of environment variables and other forms of cloudside-integrated bookkeeping.
The result? Complete consistency between how your code behaves locally and the cloudside environment.
The CloudLocal approach sets you up to rapidly and locally iterate on code, deploying to your dev environment only what is necessary to make environment configuration changes. Once the code is ready to PR from the development environment, it can be deployed to other environments (like test, staging, and production) via CI/CD automation or manually triggered commands.
Development and the Well-Architected Framework
As with our approach to design, outlined last week, the AWS Well-Architected pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost-optimization are not easily achievable without the support and automated assistance of comprehensive serverless tools.
Both the Stackery platform and the team behind it are committed to a process of continuous enhancement that helps our customer's development teams achieve Well-Architected applications rapidly, securely and at scale.
Stackery help customers realize and reinforce the development principles of this framework using powerful CloudLocal testing, consistent and scalable workflows, and security at the helm.
Read part III in the series: The Anatomy of a Secure Serverless Platform -- Delivery
We've collected content related to our design, develop, and delivery capabilities into a publication you can download and share with your whole team:
>> Download "Stackery: The Secure Serverless Platform for AWS"
Whether you're an existing user or you simply want a better idea of how Stackery can change your serverless development workflow, we invite you to schedule a complimentary workflow review. Our CTO, Chase Douglas, will review your current development process and identify areas of possible vulnerability or inefficiency in how you deliver applications.
