Deploying Serverless with Confidence

When you work serverless, you usually deploy a lot and in small increments. Obviously, you need a safety net for this to work. Luckily, AWS offers a way to run tests before and after deployments using CodeDeploy.
I will demonstrate how we used this ability to achieve confidence in our serverless deployments.

Transcript

1. Serverless Testing DEPLOYING WITH CONFIDENCE @ Alex Badyan, 2019
2. About me u Software Developer for ~13 years u Doing Serverless for 2 years u Tech Lead @ Vonage u badyan@gmail.com
3. Communications as a Service
4. Vonage dev cycle, circa 2016 u Dev work of several teams for several weeks u Code Freeze u QA u Integrations u Hardening u (Prayer) u Deployment u Post deployments tests
5. Vonage dev cycle, 2019 u Dev work for a week u Business logic u Automatic testing u Deploy to QA u Deploy to PROD
6. This sounds familiar…
7. Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash Developers OWN Quality
8. Testing paradim
9. Unit Tests u Pure business logic u Become less important as service size decreases u Watch this talk by Asaf Mesika about testing
10. Integration Tests u Test your component independently u Component = Smallest Deployable Unit u © SDU
11. Sample Architecture
12. E2E Tests u In our context can be called Smoke Tests u Similar to integration tests u May be a subset of them u Focused on testing happy paths u Include external systems u Look for problems with authentication, configuration, etc.
13. Our use case – device service u Manages provisioning of physical devices u Essentially similar to our sample architecture u Calls a service called VDP instead of Nexmo
14. Unit Tests
15. Integration/Smoke Tests
16. What is the control switch?
17. Serverless versioning in AWS u Using aliases u Gradual traffic shifting
18. Serverless Framework u Talk by Oren Herman u Each stack is an SDU u serverless-plugin-canary-deployments
19. Test runner function
20. Caveats u Mind the lambda version! u Integration with cloudformation - not great
21. Summary u Automatic rollback of deployments is crucial u Integration tests are more important than unit tests for nano services u Serverless framework makes your life easier :)
22. Questions