Another popular serverless design pattern is to perform common environment maintenance and operations. Following the CNMM requirement to have full automation, functions are a great way to execute the tasks of the system demands. As cloud landscapes grow, automation will ensure that the critical tasks to support that growth stay consistent and do not require the organization to linearly scale up the operations team supporting the environment. The possibilities for how to implement services that perform these administration tasks is limitless, bound only by the requirements and creative thinking of the operations team.
Some common administration use cases are to set up functions that execute on a schedule and check every instance across all accounts for proper tagging, correctly sized instance resources, stopping unused instances, and cleaning up unattached storage devices. In addition to routine administration tasks, serverless application designs can also be used for security administration. Examples include using functions to execute and verify the encryption of objects put in storage or disks, verifying account user policies are correctly applied, and performing checks against custom compliance policies on instances or other system components.