Introduction To Serverless Architecture
- 2. MY BACKGROUND • Originally born in Boston, MA, USA. Lived in Seattle and then New York City after graduating university. • Bachelor Of Science in Computer Systems Engineering from University of Massachusetts • Amazon Software Development Engineer, Worldwide Consumer Retail Division • Founder of Plator Solutions, AWS Cloud Consulting • https://www.platorsolutions.com
- 4. WHAT IS SERVERLESS? • We still have servers. They are just managed by the cloud provider and their existences is abstracted away. • Virtual containers • Backend as a Service (BaaS) e.g. AWS S3, Cognito, etc • No need to repeat implementation of basic services • Functions as a Services (FaaS) • Event-triggered functions in the cloud that are fully managed by a provider. (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, MS Azure) • E.g. Netflix uses a Lambda function to transform media files on demand
- 5. WHY SERVERLESS? • The natural evolution of cloud computing. Several key benefits: • #1 Benefit: Allowing developers to focus on writing business logic instead of managing cloud infrastructure. • Cost savings • Especially so for sparsely used application functions • Seamless scalability
- 6. TRADITIONAL MODEL SERVERLESS …. Concerns in traditional model: • How many host instances? • What instance types? • How to deploy application to multiple hosts? • Which operations should belong to which application fleets? • Configure load balancer to route to different hosts. • Many more ?s • Headache! Operation = chunk of code e.g. print(“Hello serverless!”)
- 7. FASTER DEVELOPMENT • Higher developer productivity = better applications, increased innovation in tech • Time to market is key in business. (e.g. AWS’s foothold in cloud computing) • Eliminate developer time spent on: • Load testing to determine optimal server types and quantity in your fleet • Having to determine traffic levels to tune fleet size • Deploying applications to server fleet • Rolling back bad deployments to the fleet • Making design decisions about which operations belong to which service. • In serverless FaaS, each operation stands on its own.
- 8. INFRASTRUCTURE COST SAVINGS • In a traditional server-based application, hardware is often underutilized. • Each server instance is waiting around to take requests, while incurring costs of keeping it running. • In a server-based model, you can scale down to save money but risk failure during traffic spikes. • E.g. Your application goes viral on Reddit and it’s your time to shine but instead it’s a flop because your application can’t handle the traffic! • In a serverless design, you only pay if your function is actually triggered and runs. Pay per sub-second time that your code runs. • This is especially beneficial if your function is sparsely called. E.g. Only called every fifteen minutes or so
- 9. SEAMLESS SCALABILITY • Do not need to spend time thinking about scale. • E.g. If you want to add a new operation to your application you can just add a new serverless function. In a traditional server-based application you would need to use a model to predict how the new operation will impact the resource utilization of your current host fleet and potentially change your fleet. E.g. New operation is CPU intensive so now need new CPU-optimized instances. • Ready for any scale at any time. • E.g. If your application goes viral on Reddit, it can handle the new traffic without need to plan for it or react to it.
- 10. DISADVANTAGES / WHEN NOT TO USE SERVERLESS FAAS • Beware of cold start latency • Leaky abstraction: A problem of the underlying implementation • May not be a good solution for computationally intensive tasks. • E.g. Data science tasks like training a machine learning model • Still new fairly new technology, tooling and documentation not as mature as traditional server-based stacks. • Pragmatism is important. Don’t use a new technology just because it’s “hot”
- 11. MY CONTACT INFO • Website: https://www.platorsolutions.com/ • Twitter: @PlatorSolutions • Facebook: Ben Sherman • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben- sherman-10011712a/