When developing a serverless custom web application, developers must prioritize designing its architecture. But this is only part of what they must prioritize. Individual service and functionality must be optimized to enhance the serverless custom web application performance. This will make the application secure, and reliable and elevate its performance.
Strategies To Optimize Serverless Custom Web Application Performance
Primarily, the performance of serverless web applications depends on 3 essential functionalities. Each must be optimized through a custom strategy. Let us explore these strategies and see how developers can leverage them.
Security
Serverless web applications are vulnerable to cyberattacks since users can trigger their functions from different touchpoints. This creates a large surface for attack, making it easy for hackers to access confidential information and data. Such privilege escalation attacks are widespread in serverless apps.
The distributed system of a serverless architecture is also prone to secret sprawl. In a distributed architecture, confidential and sensitive data like passwords, encryption keys, and tokens are sprawled across the system. They are also very insecurely stored throughout the infrastructure. This further enhances the vulnerability of the serverless app. However, opting for custom web application development can help resolve these security vulnerabilities. Developers can integrate appropriate measures that can make serverless apps more secure. Some of the critical strategies to adopt include:
Limiting lambda privileges
Over-privileged Lambda functions refer to those that enjoy more permissions than required to execute their work. Such functions pose a serious threat to serverless apps. Along with making the app vulnerable to attacks, they also give rise to compliance, complexity, and maintenance issues. Developers must counter this by implementing POLP or the Principle of least privilege. Essentially, they must reduce the number of permissions granted to lambda functions. Techniques that can be used include assigning separate IAM roles, centralization, regular review and audit, segregation of environments, etc. These techniques will give developers greater granular control over the Lambda functions and help secure the developed web app solution.
Leveraging virtual private clouds or VPCs
Essentially, VPCs are isolated private clouds hosted remotely within a public cloud. VPCs enhance the security of the serverless custom web application by offering the following:
- Scalability and convenience provided by public clouds
- Data isolation provided by private cloud computing
Advantages of VPCs include scalability, seamless hybrid cloud deployment, better performance, enhanced security, etc. These help improve the security of serverless custom web apps in many ways. For example, developers can configure virtual firewalls, control traffic to and from an RDBMS, define network access control lists or ACLs, etc. Ultimately, VPCs strengthen the overall security of the app by reducing the number of exploitable touchpoints.
Implementing sensitive data management strategies
Generally, developers will hard-code credentials within a serverless web app. But it is difficult to maintain separate permissions for separate environments. Hence, a breach in one will easily spread to the rest and infect the entire web app. Using a secret management service will help overcome this challenge by centralizing and securing sensitive data. It will also help developers meet compliance requirements and encrypt all secrets.
Reliability
Custom Web Application developers might find it challenging to ensure the reliability of a distributed system. A serverless architecture consists of multiple microservices. Each of these works independently. Hence, it is difficult to predict how often these services will interact with each other or receive requests from users. Thus, developers cannot anticipate performance degradation or app downtime. However, they can leverage certain practices to minimize interruptions in microservices and recover fast when such outages occur. These practices include:
Ensuring high availability
High availability indicates how well an app performs in instances of localized failures. Developers must make high availability integral to serverless custom app development.
Failure management
Every serverless app must come with a contingent plan for times when functions fail to execute. Being aware of the function’s retry behavior helps determine how often these functions can be invoked when an error occurs. When functions are synchronously invoked, developers must manually integrate the rebuild logic within the service invoking the function. For asynchronous invocation, retries are automatically triggered in the event of a function failure.
A dead-letter queue is another recovery option for the asynchronous invocation of functions. Here, after every three failed attempts, a detailed message of the issue will be delivered to the queue. Dead-letter queues help keep track of failed invocations. Developers can execute the function when the issue gets resolved.
These techniques improve the reliability of a serverless custom web app, ultimately improving its performance.
Performance
The associated complexities of a serverless custom web application make it difficult to improve its performance. However, developers can leverage certain best practices to optimize app performance. These practices include:
Reducing cold starts
Some functions might take relatively long to load after an inactive period. This might be because the respective execution environment needs re-initialization. Such a phenomenon is known as a cold start. It increases latency and diminishes UX. Hence, cold starts must be mitigated using the following techniques:
- Keep functions warm by invoking them regularly
- Enabling provisioned concurrency
- Make a provision to allocate more memory to a function
- Opt for small packages for deployment
- Leverage initialization hooks, etc.
Integrating these practices will enhance the performance of your serverless app and elevate user experience.
Implementing caching
This is a beneficial technique. A web application development service can implement caching extensively throughout the serverless custom web application. This process will speed up response time, help seamlessly handle read-heavy workloads, and improve the performance of the app.
Reducing initialization times
Optimizing function codes and their dependencies is a good web app development practice to adopt. The choice of the interpreted language used to write the function also plays a critical role. For example, functions written in Python and Node.js can be invoked faster than those written in compiled languages like C++, Golang, etc. Additionally, smaller function code packages load faster. Hence, instances of cold starts get reduced.
Conclusion
Performance optimization is the key to a good user experience. Hence, developers must prioritize this to develop web applications. However, they might face some challenges in elevating the performance of a serverless custom web application. To overcome them, they must follow the above strategies and best practices. The result will be a tangible improvement in web app performance.
