Implementation of a DevOps Pipeline for Serverless Applications

摘要

Context: The term "serverless" defines applications that use elements of Function as a Service or Backend as a Service cloud models in their architectures. Serverless promises infrastructure and operations cost reduction, faster software development, and automatic application scalability. Although many practitioners agree that Serverless simplifies operations part of DevOps, it still requires a new approach to automation practices because of the differences in its design and development workflow. Goal: The goal of this paper is to explore how Serverless affects DevOps practices and demonstrate a DevOps pipeline implementation for a Serverless case project. Method: As the method, we use the design science research, where the resulting artefact is a release and monitoring pipeline designed and implemented according to the requirements of the case organization. Results: The result of the study is an automated DevOps pipeline with an implementation of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Monitoring practices as required by the Serverless approach of the case project. Conclusions: The outcome shows how strongly the Serverless approach affects some automation practices such as test execution, deployment and monitoring of the application. In total, 18 out of 27 implemented practices were influenced by the Serverless-specific features of the project