Architecture reviews for serverless applications

When building an application and also later during operations the question "Am I doing it right?" arises occasionally. Especially for serverless applications no one can yet rely on many years of experience. An architecture review is a good way to determine whether best practices are being followed and whether there are any risks in the architecture.

This talk uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework with the Well-Architected Serverless Lens to show architecture recommendations based on the five pillars Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimization. A demo of the AWS Well-Architected Tool will reveal how to measure and continuously improve the application portfolio.

Transcript

1. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Dennis Kieselhorst Sr. Solutions Architect Architecture reviews for serverless applications
2. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. When you look at the systems you are building, can you answer the question: “Are you Well-Architected?”
3. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Why does Well-Architected exist? Learn Measure Improve To drive better outcomes for customers who build and operate workloads in the cloud
4. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework? Design principles Questions Pillars
5. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Pillars of AWS Well-Architected Security Cost Optimization Operational Excellence Performance Efficiency Reliability
6. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. You are not going to judge my work! It will make you slow! Here comes the audit! It blocked my project! Not an audit!
7. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. The truth is … It is an objective, constructive conversation You will learn AWS best practices You can leverage it to make informed architectural decisions You will lower or mitigate risks You will build and deploy faster
8. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless
9. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting No infrastructure provisioning, no management Automatic scaling Pay for value Highly available and secure
10. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless is there for you, at every layer Compute & access Storage Messaging & streaming
11. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless is there for you, at every layer User & identity management Delivery at the edge Analytics
12. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless is there for you, at every layer Provisioning & monitoring Development tools
13. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless Application Lens - Whitepaper Defines all areas of Serverless Applications Defines common Serverless Use Cases Defines the Best Practices in regards to the Well Architected Pillars https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architectu re/AWS-Serverless-Applications-Lens.pdf
14. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Well-Architected Tool https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected-tool/
15. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Now… some best practices by pillar Security Cost Optimization Operational Excellence Performance Efficiency Reliability
16. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Operational Excellence best practices Adopt a modern way to build applications infrastructure as code separate environments / accounts AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09’ Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31 Resources: GetProductsFunction: Type: AWS::Serverless::Function Properties: Handler: index.getProducts Runtime: nodejs10.x CodeUri: src/ Policies: - DynamoDBReadPolicy: TableName: !Ref ProductTable Events: GetResource: Type: Api Properties: Path: /products/{productId} Method: get ProductTable: Type: AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable Amazon CloudWatch Logs & metrics AWS X-Ray
17. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Operational Excellence best practices Adopt a modern way to build applications infrastructure as code separate environments / accounts Amazon CloudWatch Logs & metrics AWS X-Ray
18. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Operational Excellence best practices Observability is the way to govern the serverless application’s health • Monitor CloudWatch • Instrument X-Ray Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Metrics AWS X-Ray var AWSXRay = require(‘aws-xray-sdk-core‘); var AWS = AWSXRay.captureAWS(require(‘aws-sdk’)); S3Client = AWS.S3();
19. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Operational Excellence best practices Observability is the way to govern the serverless application’s health • Monitor CloudWatch • Instrument X-Ray Lambda PowerTools Lambda PowerTools for Java Lambda PowerTools for Python
20. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Security best practices Control access to your APIs and implement AppSec • Least privilege Cognito or a SAML / JWT identity provider SAM predefined IAM policies temporary credentials public or private API Gateway endpoints Amazon Cognito AWS Secrets Manager + = 💛 AWS WAF
21. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Reliability best practices Protect your resources and build resiliency into your serverless application throttling back-off and retries RDS Proxy long-running transactions AWS Step Functions async messaging • Decouple • Amazon SQS • Amazon SNS Amazon EventBridge to route events reliably Amazon API Gateway
22. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Performance Effiency best practices Optimize your serverless application performance services scaling behavior • Optimize application code. Yes! Do it again! on-demand capacity caching services integrations Lambda provisioned concurrency Lambda Power Tuning to tune power
23. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Wait, what’s Lambda Power Tuning? Visualize and fine-tune the memory / power configuration of Lambda functions CleanUpOnError Lambda Power Tuning
24. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Cost Optimization best practices Design your application to maximize value • Reduce your Lambda functions code asynchronous design patterns Embedded Metric Format for CloudWatch log-retention policies Lambda Power Tuning
25. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Some things to remember Make your functions single purpose, concise, short Code is debt; write fewer functions Understand and take advantage of the serverless concurrency model Share nothing; assume no hardware affinity Orchestrate with state machines, not application logic Use events to trigger transactions Leverage managed services when designing for failures and duplicates
26. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Review Process Identify a significant workload Prepare for review Review architecture Review results and improvement plan Create a plan to fix high risk issues
27. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Q&A
28. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Well-Architected Resources Whitepapers https://aws.amazon.com/well-architected/ • PDF and Kindle available • Framework • Per pillar (operational excellence, reliability, security, performance efficiency, cost optimization) • Lenses (Serverless, HPC, IoT, Machine Learning, Analytics, …) Training https://www.aws.training/Details/Curriculum?id=42037 • Framework • Pillars • Review Process • Tool
29. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Thank you! Dennis Kieselhorst, Sr. Solutions Architect dkieselh@amazon.de