1. Going Serverless with AWS Lambda
Bodor László
Going Serverless with AWS Lambda
T3EE 2016 – November 12, 2016

2. Bodor László About me Software developer since 2004 TYPO3 since 2007
Flow Framework, Symfony & Silex
AWS & Cloud architectures last 2 years
Microservices
Travel and airplanes
Self employed

3. Serverless ? No servers ? Debunking myths
Serverless DOESN’T mean there are no servers!
You, THE DEVELOPER
- Don’t have to care about servers when coding
- Don’t have to manage physical capacities

4. Focus! Developers should focus on code, not infrastructure!
Graphic by © Daniel Krook, IBM

5. Servers What is the right size for my server ?
What capacity I have left on my server ?
How many servers should I provision ?
Which OS should my server run ?
Who should have access to my servers ?
How can I detect a compromised server ?
How do I keep my server patched ?
When should I scale up / out ?
Should I tune my settings on the server ?
Hardware fails. How do I handle that ?

6. Focus! Developers should focus on the product, not infrastructure!
Graphic by © Daniel Krook, IBM

7. Microservices
Microservices is a software architecture style for complex applications. It is a specialization and an implementation approach for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
Characteristics:
Small services
Communicate over network
Language agnostic API’s
Highly decoupled
Focus on a single task
Modular approach

8. What is Serverless anyway ?
Function as a Service (FaaS) – cloud functions
“Custom code that’s run in ephemeral containers”
Mike Roberts (via martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html)
Execution model - triggering
2014 – AWS Lambda
Google Cloud Functions, IBM OpenWhisk
2016 – Azure Functions
Serverless is the next level of Microservices

9. AWS Lambda Serverless, event-driven compute service
Functions that run code without servers
Automatically scale
Pay only for the time you use
Do not pay idle time!
Triggered by events:
PUT to S3
Updates to DynamoDB table
Call to API endpoint
and more….

10. AWS Lambda Runtimes: Function as a unit of scale
Node.js
Java
Python
Function as a unit of scale
Function as a unit of deployment
Stateless nature
Microservice without servers

11. AWS Lambda Helloworld.js
Cmd$: aws lambda create-function --region eu-central-1 \
> --function-name=helloworld \
> --zip-file=fileb://helloworld.zip \
> --role arn:aws:iam:: :role/executionrole \
> --handler=helloworld.handler \
> --runtime=nodejs

12. Components of a serverless app

13. The API Gateway A fully managed service for API’s REST endpoints
API Keys
DDoS protection and Throttling
Usage plans / quotas
Staging an versioning
Pain free SSL

14. The API Gateway

15. AWS API Gateway

16. Typical Serverless app with AWS

17. Use cases Thumbnail generation and media encoding
Event driven database
Queue processing
Kinesis streams & SNS
Backups and scheduled ops (cron)
Mobile backend
Full serverless application

18. TYPO3

19. Free tier! Pricing model Duration: Pay for running time in 100 ms
Requests:
$0.20 per 1 million requests
Free tier!
1 million requests and 400,000 Gbs of compute capacity every month for FREE

20. Limitations
100 concurrent functions safety limit (at request this limit can be lifted if you need more)
1536 MB max memory / function
5 minutes max runtime
Ephemeral disk capacity “/tmp” : 512 MB
Lambda function deployment: package size 50 MB
Dependencies in deployment package max 250 MB
Total size of all the deployment packages per region: 75 GB

21. The good No servers to manage
Continuous and automatic horizontal scaling
Never pay for idle servers
Focus on code performance
Modularity

22. The bad Technology in its infancy Lack of tooling Lack of versioning
Testing is difficult when functions are chained
Debugging is difficult
Cold starts (especially with Java)
Vendor lock-in

23. Amazon Flourish Announced late spring 2016
A platform to manage components of serverless applications
Versioning of Lambda functions
Packaging lambda functions with dependencies
Open source (Apache license)
Yet to be seen (re:Invent 2016 ?)

24. Serverless Framework https://github.com/serverless/serverless
$3 million funding recently received
Other platforms supported as well
Framework for working with serverless apps

25. Conclusions Serverless is no silver bullet
Rough edges are still present
It can save you time and money developing products
Allows decoupling and modularity
The future is serverless!

26. Questions ?

27. Thank you! Get in touch laci@lacisoft.com https://lacisoft.com/blog