Architecture and design patterns for serverless applications

This thesis deals with the issue of FaaS model or Serverless, design and architecture patterns used for applications built upon this new technology. The goal of this thesis is to analyse Serverless and FaaS, identify their characteristics and the resulting advantages and disadvantages. From this information then find and introduce both the basic design patterns needed for applications built on this model and the patterns that help solve deeper problems of this technology. To achieve these goals both literature research and analyses were used to study not only texts dealing with topic of Serverless as cloud computing model but also papers discussing specifically with its design patterns. In the thesis there was identified 8 characteristics, 4 advantages, 4 disadvantages, from which there were created 4 main categories of motivations. One additional category was added that is focused on the architecture of the Serverless applications. These categories are: Service architecture, Delay and availability, Vendor lock-in, Event-driven and lastly Stateless and ethereal. Two sample applications have been created in the practical part using found patterns. Overall, there have been 18 architectural or design patterns identified dealing with solving the problems associated with this new technology. The essential design patterns are: Externalized state, Event manager, API manager, Timer. The important patterns are: Deployment framework, that allows quick deployment to the Serverless platforms, Circuit breaker controlling correct functioning of different application parts, Polling for changes that helps with external data, Function warmer, that keeps the functions “warm” or Function chain, that removes the timeout limit from FaaS functions. The remaining patterns also provide powerful solutions for different problems.