The popularity of serverless architectures continues to grow as organizations seek ease of scalability and to eliminate the need to provision and manage infrastructure. In fact, in our most recent State of Serverless report, we found that more than half of our customers have adopted serverless technologies offered by Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.

Serverless computing brings a highly efficient way to deploy applications and run software on demand. Testament to that is the fact that serverless application adoption is increasing significantly over the years, with at least 1 in 5 organizations using FaaS (Function as a Service) in major Cloud providers such as Amazon, Azure & GCP.

One of the universal truths in technology is that security always lags behind innovation. Companies must move quickly as they seek to innovate, increase efficiencies and be disruptive in ever-crowded markets. Living on the bleeding edge means you will get a few cuts, but the risk of not adopting new technologies is greater than those of a few system failures or breaches. One challenge is that it is often not apparent what new risks exist until boundaries are pushed.

Our security research team will explain a real attack scenario from the black box and white box perspective on how a vulnerable AWS Lambda function could be used by attackers as initial access into your cloud environment. Finally, we show the best practices to mitigate this vector of attack. Serverless is becoming mainstream in business applications to achieve scalability, performance, and cost efficiency without managing the underlying infrastructure.

Securing AWS Fargate serverless workloads can be tricky as AWS does not provide much detail about the internal workings. After all… it’s not your business, AWS manages the scaling of underlying resources for you. :) While the security and stability of Fargate’s system is an inherent feature, Fargate follows a shared responsibility model, where you still have to take care of securing those parts specific to your application..

A new trend for developers is emerging, as many companies shift towards using serverless computing. The name is a bit misleading, as serverless computing still relies on servers for storing data, but those who use serverless computing leave the maintenance of the server to their provider. They pay only for the storage needed to execute the code they develop.

Serverless security is a fascinating topic. As more organizations move to distributed architectures and new ways of running their services, new security considerations arise. I spoke about this topic at APIdays Paris 2020 last week, and today, I wanted to recap some of what I covered. Let’s start with the basics: what exactly is serverless, and what does it change in the ways we create software?