Learning Serverless

Chapter 4. Interfaces

You shouldn’t be uneasy about any parts of the architecture. It shouldn’t contain anything just to please the boss. It shouldn’t contain anything that’s hard for you to understand. You’re the one who’ll implement it; if it doesn’t make sense to you, how can you implement it?

Steve McConnell, Code Complete (Microsoft Press)

In Chapter 3, we discussed architecture. Traditionally, people think of the architecture of a system as the boxes in the diagram, but even more critical are the lines connecting the boxes. These lines can signify many things, and they are an abstraction of how these systems connect and communicate. In this chapter, we will study one major part of those lines: interfaces.

This chapter will discuss what an interface is, what to consider when creating or connecting to one, and the most common constructs the cloud providers offer for these lines.

Adopting modern application design comprised of smaller, independent components or services enables you to focus on development and empowers you to make the best choices in how you want to solve each problem. You should be able to focus on the features and the business logic, and the infrastructure should give you lift. But this does not come for free. You have to mind every point where coupling can occur, and minimize that coupling as much as possible. As previously discussed (in Chapter 3), you have to have rules and standards for your services’ interfaces and how they interact with other services. ...