Serverless Mythbusters

Serverless is a new paradigm for many organizations. But even organizations that are well into their serverless journey can have preconceived notions of varying veracity. In this talk, Farrah and Danielle will share their first-hand experiences and separate the preconceptions from the misconceptions. We’ll cover some topics such:

*Cold starts
*Vendor lock-in
*Does serverless replace containers?
*Is serverless good for legacy apps?
*...and more

Our goal is to share our learnings and discuss further with a wide variety of serverless users, everyone from those just getting started with serverless, to those steeped in the serverless application development community. This talk will be focused on specific techniques and is meant to apply to a broad range of serverless and modernization efforts.

Transcript

1. Serverless MythBusters Farrah Campbell & Danielle Heberling
2. Introduction Farrah Campbell Alliances & Ecosystem Director @FarrahC32 Danielle Heberling Software Engineer @deeheeber
3. Disclaimer The content in this presentation contains many anecdotes about our experiences with serverless that ultimately shaped our opinions — your experience and/or opinions might be different
4. Why Serverless? • Scales for you when needed • Lower liabilities: AWS operates the underlying infrastructure for you. • You can ship faster with fewer people.
6. Cold Starts
7. Cold Starts - Anatomy of a Cold Start Load up code and modules Setup the function execution environment API call to invoke the function Run code
8. Cold Starts - Why is this a problem? • An API endpoint that needs to be “always on” to receive requests • Slow website
9. Fact or fiction??? Danielle’s take: Both
10. Cold Start - Mitigation • Improved VPC Lambda networking • Provisioned concurrency • Have smaller package sizes • Provision more memory
11. Lock In A. Purchase a product or service B. You’re stuck using them because everything you do is centered around vendor specific things
12. Lock - In Worries A. Vendor specific knowledge on the team B. What if cloud xyz all of a sudden decides to charge me more for using their managed services C. More difficult to switch to another cloud
13. Definition of Lock - In
14. Fact or fiction??? Farrah’s take: Fiction
15. Coupling & Tradeoffs “It’s coupling, not lock-in” - Yan Cui, May 2019
16. Some form of lock in is everywhere in software engineering.
17. Containers and Serverless Does Serverless replace containers?
18. Containers/Serverless — Comparison Container Services • Always on • Multi-platform • Developer responsible for patching/updates • Can run long processes Serverless Function • Ephemeral • Cloud provider specific • Cloud provider does patching/updates • Limited execution time
19. Fact or fiction??? Danielle’s take: Fiction
20. Why Not Both???
21. Use the right tool for the right job.
22. Containers/Serverless - Working Together • Cloud Run • Fargate • Container image support for Lambda • AWS SAM local invoke uses containers under the hood
23. Serverless is only for Greenfield Applications
24. Startups are finding success
25. It’s also for Legacy Applications
26. Legacy Migration Success MasterStream • Modernizing applications into serverless architectures will reduce cost and unlock a range of cloud benefits. • Drive a 90% reduction in the costs associated with managing traditional infrastructure required for monolithic applications. • Increase engineering velocity by 60x in order to out-pace competitors.
27. Legacy Migration Success The business went from large queues of batch processes to real-time and from running on an AS/400 and Z-Series Mainframe to running a modern application using AWS Lambda and ECS.
28. Fact or fiction??? Farrah’s take: Fiction
29. More Stories of Legacy success Register of Scotland - 400 years of land deeds - reinvent talk 2020 Mphasis rearchitects a legacy application to a serverless cloud-native architecture on AWS Cedrus: Migrating a Legacy Application to a Serverless Ecosystem
30. What We Covered • Cold Starts • Vendor Lock In • Containers and Serverless • Serverless Application Success Stories
31. Thanks! @stackeryio @FarrahC32 @deeheeber