Building Scalable Web Applications using Microservices Architecture and Serverless Computing from AWS

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello everybody and welcome! Thank you for taking the time to attend this session. I feel very humble and honored to be here today to talk about Microservices Architecture. The more I dive into microservices, the more it reminds me of the joke: That any software program can be reduced to one line of code ... that has a bug. I hope my presentation is better than my joke :)
• #3: This presentation has emerged and evolved over time from our breakout session at AWS re:Invent conference back in October 2015.
• #4: My name is Eugene Istrati. I’m the Technology Partner at Mitoc Group. This slide describes a little bit about myself and my company, which is very relevant and important to emphasize the experience, but I won’t spend too much time here.
• #5: My presentation today is focused around 3 major concepts: serverless infrastructure, microservices architecture and sample web application with a hands-on demo.
• #6: My goal today is to show you hands on the value of serverless microservices. At the end of this presentation, I will demo some steps from our development process, based on the code that currently runs on todo.deep.mg. Because the initial provisioning takes some time, I’ve launched everything before this webinar, to make sure we don’t spend time waiting.
• #7: Let’s begin.
• #8: Most of us are using this reference architecture for web applications. In a nutshell, the infrastructure spreads across multiple availability zones, which means it is running in separate physical datacenters that are millisecond latency apart from each other. Therefore it is no surprise that this architecture scales in minutes.
• #9: But if you have experienced before breaking news, or viral content, or various attacks on your web application, you know that scaling in minutes is just not enough. We had to build by ourselves additional complexity to scale the infrastructure faster and meet the spiking demands.
• #10: Using this architecture on AWS makes it easier for us to maintain and support. Less operations makes the application less complex.
• #11: But we still needed experienced devops engineers to do so.
• #12: As developers, we can choose whatever technology stack we would like to use: Java or C#, Python or Ruby, Scala or Go, JavaScript or JavaScript.
• #13: But we had to recruit and hire developers with rich skillset, who are able to build and support the entire technology stack.
• #14: And, of course, this architecture is cost effective, if we implement it properly. We are paying only for resources that we are using.
• #15: But when the infrastructure doesn’t scale fast enough to meet the demand, our engineering teams are over-provisioning to solve short-term problems and buy time until they figure out long-term solutions.
• #16: While we were trying to solve these problems for our customers, two major events happened that changed everything.
• #17: 1. In 2014, at the re:Invent, Amazon launched AWS Lambda, an event-driven computing service for dynamic applications.
• #18: And 2. Last year, at NY Summit, AWS launched Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service for scalable API endpoints.
• #19: These 2 new services enabled us to reinvent the reference architecture in a completely serverless approach.
• #20: Let’s dive next into serverless microservices.
• #21: Every SaaS offering is Serverless. But what does serverless mean? Intuitively, there should be something related to “no servers”. And it is. The key concept is that customers don’t need to deal with servers and all associated operations to keep them up and running at scale. Instead, we are getting abstracted services that are highly secure and highly available, pre-provisioned and pre-scaled.
• #22: So, the main question is: How can we get to this serverless architecture? Let me show you how we transformed our customers applications running on reference architecture, explained layer by layer.
• #23: First question, how can we transform the web tier into a serverless one? Most of us think of S3 as a storage service available over the Internet. We think of S3 as a cluster of web servers behind load balancers that have turned off server side scripting modules. It is secured through IAM and there is no need to worry about underlying infrastructure.
• #24: As we are doing this transformation, the static component stays exactly the same as in reference architecture. We load everything into S3: css, javascript, documents, images, videos. And even html, which usually is served by EC2.
• #25: Because S3 doesn’t allow server side scripting, we use client side languages like JavaScript to add dynamic functionality. Modern JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS caught up a lot lately to other popular web frameworks. They provide similar patterns and best practices like Symfony, or Django, or Rails. And they are very friendly with search engines, allowing indexing of both new applications and legacy applications.
• #26: But the biggest benefit – it is completely serverless. The infrastructure comes pre-scaled at AWS size, which is virtually infinite. I have heard some people saying quote: “You will reach your budget faster than AWS will reach its physical limits”. And the bigger it is, the better it gets and the lower it costs.
• #27: Now let’s see how we transformed our app tier into a serverless one. AWS Lambda can roughly be described as a docker container on steroids. It deploys code in milliseconds and executes code in seconds. Like in case of web tier, it is secured through IAM and there is no need to worry about underlying infrastructure.
• #28: Because of the way Lambda is designed, we get out of the box an accelerated backend that has short time to live. We are writing small nodejs functions, loading them into Lambda, and consuming them through API Gateway. It is also possible to call Lambda directly, but then you need to build by yourself caching and throttling, metering and versioning. Why would you do that, when this comes pre-built into API Gateway?
• #29: And like in case of web tier, it is completely serverless.
• #30: How do we transform the database tier into a serverless one? We encourage all of us to use DynamoDB because the only operations you care about are reads per second and writes per second. And like in case of both web tier and app tier, it is secured through IAM and there is no need to worry about underlying infrastructure.
• #31: DynamoDB is an amazing schema-less key-value database like MongoDB. We only increase or decrease, reads or writes, independently from each other. But at scale, by itself, DynamoDB could be cost intensive. We virtually put SQS in front of DynamoDB and store datasets into the queue that later gets asynchronously saved into the database. Apparently, this “eventual consistency” pattern saved AWS customers like Shazam 50% of their database cost.
• #32: And again, guess what? It is completely serverless.
• #33: But if you are for some reason coupled to relational databases, you can choose RDS Aurora. It is a MySQL like database, cloud native and scales seamlessly.
• #34: What did we learn? Well, serverless approach is awesome and has its own challenges. Some developers might find these challenges unpleasant and unwanted. We actually appreciate them a lot because it enabled us to achieve more by doing less. For example, not having alternatives to Services Oriented Architecture and Application Programming Interfaces forced everybody on the team to commit and build SOA and APIs.
• #35: SOA also means we build services. But a service on AWS Lambda is constrained by design to 300 seconds execution time and 1.5G of memory. Not to mention browsers limitations with responsive design, especially on mobile devices.
• #36: That is why we have turned to microservices architecture, which I will be talking about next.
• #37: Microservices architecture is the new trend that makes all of us curious and excited. And 2 years ago, it almost didn’t exist.
• #38: What does microservices mean? In a nutshell, it’s an architectural pattern that can be applied almost anywhere, either we are talking about infrastructure, or platform, or application. Think of it like a shredder for monoliths, that makes from complex into simple and from difficult into easy. If it’s software driven, it could be designed as microservices.
• #39: Finally, we are getting to our demo.
• #40: In this demo, I will achieve the deploy my serverless application to AWS completely automated. I will go to GitHub and follow the steps from README, Getting Started section. After couple of command line executions, I will load in the browser the clone of todo app, that will be running in my own AWS account as a custom web application. Let’s see what happens.
• #41: And that concludes my presentation and opens up the floor to questions.