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Eyal Estrin
Eyal Estrin

Posted on • Originally published at eyal-estrin.Medium

Introduction to Day 2 Serverless Operations – Part 2

#aws #azure #gcp #serverless

In part 1 of this series, I introduced some of the most common Day 2 serverless operations, focusing on Function as a Service.

In this part, I will focus on serverless application integration services commonly used in event-driven architectures.

For this post, I will look into message queue services, event routing services, and workflow orchestration services for building event-driven architectures.

Message queue services

Message queues enable asynchronous communication between different components in an event-driven architecture (EDA). This means that producers (systems or services generating events) can send messages to the queue and continue their operations without waiting for consumers (systems or services processing events) to respond or be available.

Security and Access Control

Security should always be the priority, as it protects your data, controls access, and ensures compliance from the outset. This includes data protection, limiting permissions, and enforcing least privilege policies.

Monitoring and Observability

Once security is in place, implement comprehensive monitoring and observability to gain visibility into system health, performance, and failures. This enables proactive detection and response to issues.

Error Handling

With monitoring established, set up robust error handling mechanisms, including alerts, retries, and dead-letter queues, to ensure reliability and rapid remediation of failures.

Scaling and Performance

After ensuring security, visibility, and error resilience, focus on scaling and performance. Monitor throughput, latency, and resource utilization, and configure auto-scaling to match demand efficiently.

Maintenance

Finally, establish ongoing maintenance routines such as regular reviews, updates, cost optimization, and compliance audits to sustain operational excellence and adapt to evolving needs.

Event routing services

Event routing services act as the central hub in event-driven architectures, receiving events from producers and distributing them to the appropriate consumers. This decouples producers from consumers, allowing each to operate, scale, and fail independently without direct awareness of each other.

Monitoring and Observability

Serverless event routing services require robust monitoring and observability to track event flows, detect anomalies, and ensure system health; this is typically achieved through metrics, logs, and dashboards that provide real-time visibility into event processing and failures.

Error Handling and Dead-Letter Management

Effective error handling uses mechanisms like retries and circuit breakers to manage transient failures, while dead-letter queues (DLQs) capture undelivered or failed events for later analysis and remediation, preventing data loss and supporting troubleshooting.

Security and Access Management

Security and access management involve configuring fine-grained permissions to control which users and services can publish, consume, or manage events, ensuring that only authorized entities interact with event routing resources and that sensitive data remains protected.

Scaling and Performance

Serverless platforms automatically scale event routing services in response to workload changes, spinning up additional resources during spikes and scaling down during lulls, while performance optimization involves tuning event patterns, batching, and concurrency settings to minimize latency and maximize throughput.

Workflow orchestration services

Workflow services are designed to coordinate and manage complex sequences of tasks or business processes that involve multiple steps and services. They act as orchestrators, ensuring each step in a process is executed in the correct order, handling transitions, and managing dependencies between steps.

Monitoring and Observability

Set up and review monitoring dashboards, logs, and alerts to ensure workflows are running correctly and to quickly detect anomalies or failures.

Error Handling and Retry

Investigate failed workflow executions, enhance error handling logic (such as retries and catch blocks), and resubmit failed runs where appropriate. This is crucial for maintaining workflow reliability and minimizing manual intervention.

Security and Access Management

Workflow orchestration services require continuous enforcement of granular access controls and the principle of least privilege, ensuring that each function and workflow has only the permissions necessary for its specific tasks.

Versioning and Updates

Workflow orchestration services use versioning to track and manage different iterations of workflows or services, allowing multiple versions to coexist and enabling users to select, test, or revert to specific versions as needed.

Cost Optimization

Regularly review usage and billing data, optimize workflow design (e.g., reduce unnecessary steps or external calls), and adjust resource allocation to control operational costs.

Summary

In this blog post, I presented the most common Day 2 serverless operations when using application integration services (message queues, event routing services, and workflow orchestrations) to build modern applications.

I looked at aspects such as observability, error handling, security, performance, etc.

Building event-driven architectures requires time to grasp which services best support this approach. However, gaining a foundational understanding of key areas is essential for effective day 2 serverless operations.

About the author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, an AWS Community Builder, and the author of the books Cloud Security Handbook and Security for Cloud Native Applications, with more than 25 years in the IT industry.

You can connect with him on social media (https://linktr.ee/eyalestrin).

Opinions are his own and not the views of his employer.

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