Integrating different infrastructure providers happens through the standard plugin system. Take a look at the "building plugins" documentation to understand how the plugin system works.
You can add the providers name inside the constructor of your plugin. This makes it possible to only execute your plugins logic when the Serverless service uses the provider you've specified in your plugin.
Infrastructure provider plugins should bind to specific lifecycle events of the deploy
command to compile the function
and their events to provider specific resources.
Let's take a look at the core deploy
plugin and the different lifecycle hooks it provides.
The following lifecycle events are run in order once the user types serverless deploy
and hits enter:
deploy:cleanup
deploy:initialize
deploy:setupProviderConfiguration
deploy:compileFunctions
deploy:compileEvents
deploy:createDeploymentArtifacts
deploy:deploy
You, as a plugin developer can hook into those lifecycles to compile and deploy functions and events on your providers infrastructure.
Let's take a closer look at each lifecycle event to understand what its purpose is and what it should be used for.
Remove the .serverless
directory which stores all the artifacts which were previously deployed to make sure that the
new artifacts can be stored in the .serverless
directory and won't conflict with the old ones.
This lifecycle should be used to load the basic resources the provider needs into memory (e.g. parse a basic resource template skeleton such as a CloudFormation template).
The purpose of the deploy:setupProviderConfiguration
lifecycle is to take the basic resource template which was created in
the previous lifecycle and deploy the rough skeleton on the cloud providers infrastructure (without any functions
or events) for the first time.
The whole service get's zipped up into one .zip file. Serverless will automatically exclude the following files / folders to reduce the size of the .zip file:
- .git
- .gitignore
- .serverless
- serverless.yaml
- serverless.yml
- serverless.env.yaml
- serverless.env.yml
- .DS_Store
You can always include previously excluded files and folders if you want to.
Next up the functions inside the serverless.yml
file should be
compiled to provider specific resources and stored into memory.
After that the events which are defined in the serverless.yml
file on a per function basis should be compiled to provider specific resources and also stored into memory.
The final lifecycle is the deploy:deploy
lifecycle which should be used to deploy the previously compiled function and
event resources to the providers infrastructure.
Curious how this works for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider integration? Here are the steps the AWS plugins take to compile and deploy the service on the AWS infrastructure in detail.
- The
serverless.yml
andserverless.env.yml
files are loaded into memory - A default AWS CloudFormation template is loaded and deployed to AWS (A S3 bucket for the service gets created)
(
deploy:setupProviderConfiguration
) - The functions of the
serverless.yml
file are compiled to lambda resources and stored into memory (deploy:compileFunctions
) - Each functions events are compiled into CloudFormation resources and stored into memory (
deploy:compileEvents
) - Old artifacts (if available) are removed from the S3 bucket (
deploy:deploy
) - The service gets zipped up (
deploy:createDeploymentArtifacts
anddeploy:deploy
) - The compiled functions, event resources and custom provider resources are attached to the core CloudFormation template
(
deploy:deploy
) - The zipped service and CloudFormation template are uploaded to S3 (
deploy:deploy
) - The stack will be updated with the help of the recently uploaded artifacts (
deploy:deploy
)
You may also take a closer look at the corresponding plugin code to get a deeper knowledge about what's going on behind the scenes.
The full AWS integration can be found in lib/plugins/aws
.