Learning Serverless Security

Chapter 5. Understanding how Serverless Functions Work

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. This will be the 5th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on. If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

If you have tried setting up an entire production server from scratch and deployed your custom application inside this server, you probably know that it takes a significant amount of time and effort to get all of these done correctly. If there’s a security vulnerability in the server that needs to be patched right away, you would have to stop working on the feature development tasks and spend a bit of time updating the servers and the installed application prerequisites.

Serverless functions allow developers to focus on writing code and worry less about managing the resources and environments where the code is running. Of course, behind the scenes, the code is just running in an environment managed by the cloud provider.

Figure 5-1. Serverless functions allow developers to ...