Top serverless mistakes

What mistakes are people making when adopting serverless?

Published: Friday, Jun 30, 2023 Last modified: Monday, Nov 11, 2024

Using API gateway routing instead of a catchall

Aka Functions calling each other directly/coupling functions

Aka using Step Functions 🤦‍♂️

Aka splitting up a application for no good reason and not practicing Monolith First

  Events:
    CatchAll:
      Type: HttpApi
      Properties:
        ApiId: !Ref Gateway
        Path: /{proxy+}
        Method: ANY

Putting the whole application into one lambda is best practice in my eyes and is also known as “fat lambdas” by some.

Not keeping to the standard http interface

Aka breaking local development

For Javascript users, use serverless-http to abstract away the awkward AWS Lambda interface.

For Go users, use Apex Gateway v2

And whilst I have your attention, please use structured logs!

Not using a framework

Aka using Terraform or Cloudformation for orchestrating lambdas and finding it awkward.

Leveraging the AWS runtime requires some boilerplate to:

Doing this from scratch (or in Terraform) is error prone and time consuming.

I recommend using AWS SAM Aka AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31.


Thanks for contributing Rich Buggy, Yan Cui & Jordan Finneran!