Serverless Security: Comparing FaaS to IaaS

As more and more organizations are moving towards a serverless or Function as a Service (FaaS) architecture and framework, understanding how this affects security is essential. There are both pros and cons to implementing a serverless solution from a security perspective. This course will look at both the benefits and the negatives when adopting a FaaS solution and how this affects the safeguarding of your data.

Most people have a deeper understanding of IaaS security, but some of the secure methods used within IaaS are not required within FaaS and vice versa. There are also a number of security threats and concerns which affect both FaaS and IaaS architectures which will also be discussed.

Towards the end of the course, it explains how serverless is impacted by the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) top 10 list of vulnerabilities.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will

Understand and be able to distinguish between the pros and cons of serverless security
Understand where to focus additional security controls in a FaaS solution
Have a general overview of how security differs to that of a typical IaaS solution

Intended Audience

This content in this course would be beneficial to:

Engineers who are focused on delivering secure serverless solutions within an enterprise environment
Security architects looking to enhance their knowledge of FaaS solutions
Developers deploying applications within a serverless environment

Prerequisites

As a prerequisite of this course you should have a basic knowledge and awareness of the following:

A general understanding of what Serverless means
Understand what FaaS and IaaS relates to
A basic awareness of different attack vectors, such as DoS
AWS Lambda
Amazon Cognito
Amazon API Gateway
Security controls within IAM