Foreword

Cloud computing has been my passion for years. Ever since I started focusing on this area, advances in automation and software have continually amazed me. This amazement fueled the inspiration for my blog, Cloud Musings (http://blog.govcloudnetwork.com). Now in its tenth year, the blog's content has matured from explaining the basics of cloud computing to addressing its advantages from a business standpoint. Now that the second decade of the cloud computing era is upon us, why are the standard IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models all of a sudden being replaced with serverless computing and the new Function as a Service (FaaS) model? Is this the end of cloud computing as we know it? Is my career as an application developer about to change again?

Luckily for many of us, cloud computing is not going away. Serverless computing, in fact, represents the next stage in cloud maturation. Although a misnomer, FaaS takes technology abstraction to the next level by completely removing infrastructure considerations from the developer's plate. With serverless computing, developers can now develop, deploy, and run applications without needing to think about provisioning servers. Developers don't even need to worry about managing or even scaling the infrastructure. All of these headaches are taken care of by the cloud service provider.

Similar to how the Large Hadron Collider explores and discovers elementary particles, the FaaS approach drives developers toward discovering, and in this domain, creating single-purpose blocks of code. Putting this in another way, just like physicists have abandoned the atom and accepted fermions and bosons as the most elementary particles, software developers must now abandon monolithic applications and microservices to accept the function block.

Hands-On Serverless Computing does not stop at explaining this new worldview. It gives the modern developer much-needed tools for creating and deploying serverless applications to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In providing his expert guidance, Kuldeep Chowhan goes into depth on development environments such as Visual Studio, Node.js, and JavaScript. He even tackles application testing with Postman.

If you are a developer and want to participate in cloud computing's future, you must accept this book as your serverless computing bible. Ignoring this inevitable change is like ignoring the microprocessor, object-oriented code, and the internet.

Kevin L. Jackson