Serverless Security

Chapter 1. Introduction to Serverless and Cloud Native

Serverless is an exciting new paradigm, and it’s taking the cloud-native world by storm. It promises dramatic value, ranging from extreme developer productivity through seamless elastic scaling to dramatic cost savings. On top of all of those, it boasts very real security benefits, too.

This short book explores this last point. It reviews how the serverless paradigm affects the security of an application, including the benefits it brings. More important, it helps you, the owner of the serverless application, understand what you should do to keep your serverless apps secure, and gives some practical tips on how to do so. Let’s begin in this first chapter with an overview of serverless and cloud native.

The Evolution of Cloud Native

To understand serverless, why it’s useful, and how it affects security, we need to first discuss the journey that led to its creation, and to do that, we need to take a short walk down memory lane and see how the cloud-native evolution unfolded.

An application in production is, in simple terms, made up of code that runs on servers, typically managing some state. This server and code duo interfaces with users and other systems, and typically reads and writes data to a database of some kind. Over time, the world of modern infrastructure has changed the nature of this underlying server, constantly striving for better resource utilization, lower management effort and greater agility.

Serverless is a ...