Serverless Computing with AWS
- 1. Serverless Computing With AWS 01/03/2018 By Timothee
- 3. Definition ● Managing functions, not apps or servers ● Tasks triggered by events ● Wikipedia: ○ “Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of the machine resources”.
- 4. Comparison of the main cloud providers ● AWS Lambda: Built-in versioning with traffic split, staging environments, good online IDE ● Azure Functions: A few advantages over AWS Lambda like support of F# and PowerShell but more limited for C# (single file) and Java (preview) ● Google Cloud Functions: Only Node.js and still in beta
- 5. AWS Lambda online IDE (Cloud 9)
- 6. Why should we care about serverless computing?
- 8. Let’s build Craigslist! Designing with and without serverless computing ● Marketplace to buy and sell second-hand items ● 100+ million unique visitors per month ● Simple website with login ● No need to create an account or to share an email address to contact someone ○ Two-way anonymous email system
- 9. Anonymous email system without serverless ● What do we need? ● Setting up email system (on-premise or hosted) ● Database to know which emails have been processed ● Distributed fault-tolerant job that regularly reads the inbox, check the database, and send emails ● Setting up the database and backend servers (deployment, monitoring, load balancing, security). ● Estimated implementation time? ● What is a two-way anonymous email system? ● A@gmail.com sends an email to {encrypt(“B@gmail.com”)}@craigslist.com ● The system should send the same email from {encrypt(“A@gmail.com”)}@craiglist.com to B@gmail.com
- 10. Anonymous email system with serverless ● What do we need? ● Configuring AWS Simple Email Server (SES) to receive emails ● One AWS Lambda function! ● Event: Email received by AWS SES ● Action: ○ Encrypt and decrypt email addresses ○ Create new email with the same body and attachments ○ Send the email ● Estimated implementation time? ● Less than one day!
- 11. Advantages of serverless computing ● Integrated cloud services ● Automatic scaling ● Built-in fault tolerance ● Built-in security ● Built-in monitoring/alerts ● Built-in logging per execution (easier to read logs) ● Fast and easy deployment ● Isolated sandbox environment (less issues with CPU, memory and thread resources) ● Don’t pay for idle time
- 12. Limitations of AWS Lambda 3 years ago and now
- 13. AWS Lambda in its early days AWS Lambda launched in November 2014 and had a fair amount of limitations: ● High latency (~1 second) ● Supports only Node.js ● Everything in a single file ● No staging environment, no versioning ● API endpoints always returning 202 ● Hard to write AWS Lambda functions outside the online editor (no local emulator).
- 14. AWS Lambda today ● Lower latency (~100 ms) ● Support for multiple files ● More languages: Node.js, Python, Java 8, C# and Go ● Java: upload your jar file. Convenient for unit testing, Git, continuous delivery. ● Better online IDE (Cloud9) ● Versioning with traffic split (e.g 99% on v1.2, 1% on v1.3) ● API endpoints with custom HTTP responses and staging environments thanks to AWS API Gateway
- 15. Remaining limitations ● Latency is not negligible and not predictable (~100ms) ● Short actions (less than 5 minutes) ● Less than 250MB of uncompressed code ● Not easy to manage hundreds of AWS Lambda functions ● Not good for local caches
- 16. Summary
- 17. When is serverless computing useful? ● Good for short background independent tasks, triggered with timers or HTTP calls ● Not always good for Web API endpoints (extra latency, dependencies between CRUD operations)
- 18. Questions
- 19. Sources ● Images: ○ https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/getting-started- with-aws-lambda-and-serverless-computing-79032206 ○ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloud9/latest/user-guide/lambda-fu nctions.html