How Serverless Computing Enables Microservices and Micropayment

Editor's Notes

• #3: The fundamental goal of every web application is to be up and running 24/7. But it’s a huge challenge to do it at scale. Failures can happen to anyone, even the big guys. No name calling today.
• #4: To quote the CTO of Amazon.com: Everything fails, all the time.
• #5: And my two cents: I don’t know about you guys, but in my experience, it usually doesn’t happen during business hours, when you are in front of your computer.
• #6: My name is Eugene Istrati. I’m the Cofounder and Technology Partner at Mitoc Group. As AWS Technology Partners and featured AWS Lambda Partners, it is my please and honor to be here today to speak in front of you guys.
• #7: My goal today is to explain as much as I can about serverless infrastructure, microservices architecture and show case some real life examples.
• #8: Let’s start with serverless concept. What does serverless mean? Intuitively, there should be something that involves “no servers”. Yes, to be precise, we as developers 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.
• #9: But my favorite explanation is a tweet by Netflix former Chief Architect, Adrian Cockcroft: If your PaaS can efficiently start instances in 20ms that run for half a second, then call it serverless.
• #10: AWS offers a large variety of serverless options. To emphasize how big this is, please raise your hand, keep it up and look around if you’re using Amazon S3.
• #11: This is a blogpost and several do it yourself videos that we’ve published last year on how to use serverless options on AWS.
• #12: Let’s assume that we already have some experience working with serverless infrastructure. What’s next? We’ll take an existing web application and transform it to use serverless computing. How can we do that?
• #13: There is no magic here. Let me show you how we did it for an existing application running on AWS. I’ll describe it layer by layer.
• #14: 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.
• #15: 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.
• #16: 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.
• #17: 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.
• #18: Now let’s see how we transformed our app tier into a serverless one. AWS Lambda can roughly be described a self-managed container service. 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.
• #19: 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 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.
• #20: And like in case of web tier, it is completely serverless.
• #21: Last, but not the least, how do we transform the data 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.
• #22: 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. That is why we virtually put SQS in front of DynamoDB and store datasets into the queue that gets asynchronously saved into the database. Apparently, this “eventual consistency” pattern saved Shazam 50% of their database cost.
• #23: And again, guess what? It is completely serverless.
• #24: 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.
• #25: Now, we have a lot to digest around serverless concept, so why do we need another concept, like microservices?
• #26: To understand why, let’s see what does microservices mean. In a nutshell, it is 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 software, that makes from complex into simple and from difficult into easy. If it’s software driven, it could be designed as microservices.
• #27: Microservices architecture is the new trend that makes all of us really curious and very excited. That is why it’s so surprising that 2 years ago microservices as a term almost didn’t exist, according to Google Trends.
• #28: Now, I would like to switch to the first demo of the day and show you some serverless microservices in action.
• #29: This is a blogpost and several do it yourself videos that we’ve published last year on how to use serverless options on AWS.
• #30: To emphasize even further how we are leveraging serverless infrastructure and microservices architecture, I would like to talk about our own experiment, a micropayments platform called AdTechMedia.
• #31: AdTechMedia is innovative advertising technology for media companies. It aims to empower publishers and content providers to monetize their content through complimentary revenue streams like native micropayments.
• #32: And this concludes my presentation for today.
• #33: As a next step, I invite you to checkout our Github and Slideshare, as well as read our blog powered by Medium.com.