The co-founder of your brilliant startup idea: Serverless!

Startups need to be fast to beat the competition that they are in. They also need to be able to pivot their value proposition when needed. Serverless comes as a rescue with its great advantages for startups who want to ship their idea to the market in the fastest way possible. In this presentation, we went over the opportunities of serverless that startups can take advantage of. There's also a real-life case study, vacationtracker.io, to prove our claim.

Transcript

1. The co-founder of your brilliant startup idea: Serverless! Emrah Şamdan DevopsDays Istanbul 9/19/2019
2. @emrahsamdan Who am I? • Developer for 6+ years • Product manager for 2 years • VP of Product for Thundra • Organizing committee • ServerlessDays İstanbul On October 3rd!
3. @emrahsamdan
4. @emrahsamdan
5. @emrahsamdan
6. @emrahsamdan How did Pikachu defeat stronger pokemons?
7. @emrahsamdan Fast
8. @emrahsamdan Ready to attack again!
9. @emrahsamdan Strong adaptive weapons
10. You’re like Pikachu. Be Pikachu! What’s your weapon?
11. Don’t try to imitate the big companies!
12. SERVERLESS
13. @emrahsamdan What’s serverless Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
14. @emrahsamdan Let’s make something clear Serverless doesn’t mean that there is no server running behind. It means you don’t care who or how runs it.
15. @emrahsamdan What’s serverless? A doctrine, a thought model helping you deliver faster and put your focus on the value you provide to your customers. Ben Kehoe Paul Johnston
16. Focus on value to deliver to your customer not on the availability of your system.
17. @emrahsamdan WHY SERVERLESS? Autoscaling
18. @emrahsamdan WHY SERVERLESS? Pay per use
19. @emrahsamdan WHY SERVERLESS? Nothing to maintain
20. @emrahsamdan WHY SERVERLESS? Speed to market
21. @emrahsamdan ORGANIZATIONAL BENEFITS Start small, iterate to big
22. @emrahsamdan ORGANIZATIONAL BENEFITS Achieving more with less Developer Productivity Organizational Belonging
23. @emrahsamdan TECHNICAL BENEFITS Isolated functions Security Separation of Concerns IAM1 IAM2 IAM3
24. @emrahsamdan Serverless is best fit • If you expect a traffic with unexpected spikes and lows. • If you don’t want to worry about how to scale your services. • If you want compute as a variable cost. • If you’re short for hiring best ops people. • If you want to developer time for delivering value.
25. A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE
26. @emrahsamdan vacationtracker.io Slobodan Stojanovic, AWS Serverless Hero, CTO of Vacationtracker.io
27. @emrahsamdan Vacation Tracker • Started as a hackathon project • Slack Chatbot, Dashboards and Calendar Integration • 2 fulltime full-stack engineers (Front-end essence) • Design outsourced • No ops people. • Using Claudia.js • 3M invocations per month for Lambda
28. @emrahsamdan https://speakerdeck.com/slobodan/serverless-and-startups-the-beginning-of-a-beautiful-friendship?slide=1
29. @emrahsamdan Happy customers
30. COST
31. COST $140
32. COST $140 $0 Credits
33. ARR
34. ARR $100K
35. SERVERLESS_RULES
37. @emrahsamdan Vendor Lock-in • Should you really worry about it? ◦ No increase in prices ◦ There will always be competition • Consider switching costs. • Good planning and architecture • It’s not FaaS, it’s other services.
38. @emrahsamdan Limitations • Only with some programming languages • Cold starts with VPN • Cold Starts with Java and .NET • Short time to execute • Limit for the binary size
39. @emrahsamdan Limitations • Only with some programming languages • Cold starts with VPN • Cold Starts with Java and .NET • Short time to execute • Limit for the binary size
40. Today’s limitations are tomorrow’s feature announcements.
41. @emrahsamdan Cold Start Improvements https://levelup.gitconnected.com/aws-lambda-cold-start-language-comparisons-2019-edition-%E F%B8%8F-1946d32a0244
42. @emrahsamdan Cold start and VPC
43. @emrahsamdan Other Improvements • Execution time: 5 min -> 15 min • Big size of binaries -> Lambda Layers • Limited runtimes -> Bring your own runtime
44. @emrahsamdan What’s left? • Still some cold starts. • Observability and Security • Local testing • CI/CD
45. Not a silver bullet.
46. @emrahsamdan Don’t prefer serverless if • You require a longer duration times than 15 minutes. ◦ Data processing in big batches • You need more memory than 3GB. • Milliseconds are important for you. ◦ High frequency trading • Consistent traffic with no peaks
47. Think serverless.
48. @emrahsamdan Don’t own it • Stripe for payment • Auth0, Cognito for authentication • Thundra for observability. • Netlify for web-site • Apiary, Readme.io for documentation • And more.
49. @emrahsamdan Use pay-per-use • DynamoDB on-demand. • API Gateway • SQS, SNS
50. @emrahsamdan Key takeaways • Don’t imitate big companies. • Start small and scale to big with serverless. • Focus on the value for your customers. • Achieve better time-to-market with serverless. • If you need more processing power, serverless is not for you. • Adopt serverless-first thinking.
51. Thank you!