How do you secure and manage the access and permissions of serverless functions and pub sub messages?

1 What are serverless and pub sub?

Serverless is a model of cloud computing where you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You only pay for the resources you consume and the code is triggered by events. Pub sub is a pattern of communication where you publish messages to a topic and subscribe to receive them. Pub sub decouples the producers and consumers of messages and enables asynchronous and distributed processing.

2 Why use serverless and pub sub together?

Serverless and pub sub complement each other in many ways. For example, you can use pub sub to trigger serverless functions based on events, such as new data, user actions, or system changes. You can also use serverless functions to process pub sub messages, such as transforming, filtering, or enriching them. By using serverless and pub sub together, you can achieve high scalability, availability, and performance for your applications.

3 How to secure serverless functions?

Serverless functions are stateless and ephemeral, meaning they don't store any sensitive data or credentials. Nonetheless, they still need to access other resources, such as databases, APIs, or pub sub topics. To ensure security of serverless functions, it’s best to use identity and access management (IAM) policies to grant the minimum permissions needed for each function. Additionally, encryption and key management services should be used to protect data in transit and at rest. Secrets management services should be utilized to store and retrieve credentials and tokens securely. Finally, logging and monitoring tools should be employed to track and audit function activity and anomalies.