Embrace the future of cloud computing! Discover how to hire qualified Serverless developers to create efficient, cost-effective, and scalable applications.
Developers around the world have the ability to run applications in production without having to worry about servers, thanks to serverless applications. Serverless is a pretty broad term that covers a few different things. However, in the development world, it refers to applications that have the ability to scale automatically.
Typically, scaling an application meant expensive time spent maintaining, running, and patching critical infrastructure items like servers, clusters, and load balancers. Thanks to serverless development, these worries are a thing of the past.
For some developers, building serverless applications may seem like a pretty significant change from more traditional development methods. After all, it involves adopting functional programming models, moving to microservices, and using managed services to reduce code. However, serverless applications can complement traditional application models as well as augment, integrate, or even connect to traditional applications. This makes it a highly in-demand career path and general skill for developers of all experience levels.
Hiring Guide
In 2008, Amazon launched its EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) Service , which created a revolution in the development world as it gave everyone the ability to add new server capacity to their applications on demand. Considered the grandfather of serverless development, Amazon and other major computing companies (including Google and Microsoft) have since improved their serverless options to what they are today.
Serverless is a cloud-native development model that gives developers the ability to build and run applications without having to manage or worry about servers. Although there are still servers involved in serverless, they are not directly involved in application development. The cloud provider manages routine maintenance, scaling, and provisioning of the servers, while developers simply maintain their code in packages for deployment.
In addition to “organic” application building and development, serverless technologies are a great way to connect applications. Developers have the ability to quickly create endpoints to handle incoming webhooks, execute the necessary business logic on the webhook payload, and transfer the output result to the connected server.
Serverless development is still relatively new in the development world, but it is currently more in demand than ever as it is incredibly beneficial for application owners and businesses. This separation between back-end needs and front-end development becomes an incredibly beneficial practice, with advantages including:
- Easy adoption of DevOps, thanks to less need for developers to explicitly describe the provisions they need to operate.
- Simplified application development through incorporation of third-party BaaS products
- Increased developer productivity by offloading routine tasks associated with server provisioning and management.
- Reduced overall operating costs as serverless models only require payment based on usage, which replaces the higher costs of operating and managing personal servers.
With companies always looking to create new applications, the popularity of serverless technologies will only grow over time – meaning the job market for developers will continue to expand and demand will grow as well. Many existing developers are choosing to learn how to work with these new technologies to stay ahead of the game in their fields.
Interview Questions
What are the 4 general “principles” of serverless technologies and development?
- It offers automatic scaling based on usage.
- Application owners pay for value rather than simply paying for server units.
- There are no servers for developers to maintain or manage.
- It offers fault tolerance and availability as built-in aspects.
What are the 2 main types of serverless architectures?
- Backend as a Service or BaaS – It is the practice of using third-party services to obtain the means of production. When using BaaS, the customer uses external services such as database management, authentication, and user management to handle business logic.
- Function as a Service or FaaS – refers to stateless functions used to contain business logic executed on the server side. They run in independent containers and are event-driven.
Are serverless and containers the same thing?
Although they are very similar in many ways, serverless and containers are two different things. These technologies allow developers to focus on their creativity and coding skills rather than wasting time building infrastructure to help increase development speed. Both are great options for microservices and component-based architecture.
Developers working on serverless architectures have the ability to quickly release and iterate new applications without worrying about scalability. Serverless is more cost-effective than containers because the code does not require constant use. Containers give developers more control over the application environment, but this comes with additional maintenance and the use of languages and libraries. Containers are useful when migrating legacy applications to the cloud.
What are some of the cons of serverless architectures?
- Serverless means working with an external provider for servers, which means some disadvantages as developers don't run or control their own server-side logic.
- Working with an external server source means opening up the opportunity for vendor lock-in. If developers decide to change suppliers, this will likely incur costs associated with updating systems to adhere to new specifications.
- Some cloud providers have strict rules for interacting with their components. This can affect the flexibility and customization of a customer's system. BaaS environments are particularly affected by this, as developers may not have control over some code.
Job description
We're looking for a highly qualified serverless developer to join our growing team. Successful candidates must have extensive experience working in serverless environments (specifically AWS, Google, and Microsoft platforms) to develop standalone applications and integrations.
We demand consistently clean and efficient coding practices, with reliability, proficiency, and effectiveness as top priorities.
Job responsibilities
- Contribute product concepts and prototypes
- Produce new and innovative development, monitoring, and advanced troubleshooting solutions for serverless architectures
- Ingest and process large volumes of payloads, logs, metrics, etc.
- Provide useful log and transaction query capabilities to help development and operations teams troubleshoot issues
- Perform log and transaction analysis
- Integrate serverless architectures with additional technologies and vendors
Job Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or similar
- Experience with services common to serverless architectures (AWS, API Gateway, IAM, etc.)
- Extensive experience in software design and development
- Deep knowledge in data engineering and design
- Experience building REST APIs, data streaming, and other common application architectures
- Skilled experience building data streaming applications with Java, Apache Flink, Kinesis Streams, and Data Analytics
