HOW TOOLING WILL MAKE OR BREAK SERVERLESS INFRASTRUCTURE 

WHO AM I Florian Motlik ‣Co-Founder and former CTO of Codeship ‣Former CTO of Serverless Inc AWS/Serverless/Development Process Consultant
 Need help in your infrastructure: flo@flomotlik.me T W I T T E R : @ F L O M O T L I K W E B S I T E : F L O M O T L I K . M E E M A I L : F L O @ F L O M O T L I K . M E 

WHAT IS SERVERLESS 

EVENT DRIVEN SYSTEM Service A F1 F2 F3 Service C F1 F2 Service B F1 Service E F1 F2 F3 Service F F1 F2 F3 Service D F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 S3 Kinesis DynamoDB Api Gateway 

CLOUD 2.0, SUPER ADVANCED CLOUD, … 

MIGHTY SCALIN POWER CLOUD It’s Scalin’ Time! 

THE SERVERLESS TEAM ▸ Least Amount of Control ▸ Least Amount of Responsibility ▸ Complete Automation ▸ Gradual Escalation of Control and Responsibility ▸ Build for Replacement 

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR OUR TOOLS 

HEAVY LIFTING IS DONE IN SERVICES ▸ Scheduling of Tasks ▸ Scaling of System ▸ Collecting of Log Data ▸ Authentication between Services ▸ Storing and managing data storage ▸ Provisioning and scaling Queue infrastructure ▸ … 

WHAT IS IMPORTANT, PAST VS PRESENT Past Features ‣ Replication ‣ Scalability ‣ … 

PAST SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER 

PAST SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER Application cluster Database cluster Data and ETL Pipeline 

PAST VS PRESENT Past Present Features ‣ Replication ‣ Scalability ‣ … Usability Accessibility Best Practices 

MAKE IT EASY TO COMBINE SERVICES Service A F1 F2 F3 Service C F1 F2 Service B F1 Service E F1 F2 F3 Service F F1 F2 F3 Service D F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 S3 Kinesis DynamoDB Api Gateway 

BAD TOOLS WILL PUSH US AWAY FROM SERVICES ▸ Many examples in AWS from great services that aren’t used enough ▸ CloudFormation ▸ IAM ▸ CloudWatch Metrics, Logs and Alerts ▸ Custom Resources ▸ AWS Config 

SAME PROBLEM NO MATTER THE COMPANY SIZE 

UNREASONABLY COMPLEX TO START 

SO WHATS HOLDING US BACK 

CLOUDFORMATION IS THE MAKE OR BREAK SERVICE 

HORRIBLE CLI TOOLING FROM AWS ▸ Hard to learn and hard to read configuration ▸ No built-in modularity for one stack making config files huge ▸ There is no built-in command to deploy a stack, wait for it to be deployed and get the CF events as cli output 

CLOUDFORMATION IS OUR ASSEMBLY CODE 

ALL TOOLS SHOULD WORK TOWARDS CLOUDFORMATION ▸ Standard Endpoint allows us to swap out tools ▸ Not possible with other tools like Terraform as state is stored separately 

ALL TOOLS SHOULD WORK TOWARDS CLOUDFORMATION ▸ Standard Endpoint allows us to swap out tools ▸ Not possible with other tools like Terraform as state is stored separately ▸ Easier to support standards 

ALL TOOLS SHOULD WORK TOWARDS CLOUDFORMATION ▸ Standard Endpoint allows us to swap out tools ▸ Not possible with other tools like Terraform as state is stored separately ▸ Easier to support standards ▸ This also makes sure we’re building better low level tools with better UX 

SIMPLE TOOLS TO MAKE CF MORE USEFUL ▸ Awsie (https://github.com/flomotlik/awsie) awsie example-stack s3 ls s3://cf:DeploymentBucket: --region us-west-1 aws s3 ls s3://formica-example-stack-deploymentbucket-1jjzisylxreh9 --region us-west-1
 awsie example-stack —command “echo //cf:DeploymentBucket:” --region us-west-1 
 echo s3://formica-example-stack-deploymentbucket-1jjzisylxreh9 

WHAT WE NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR 

STOP BUILDING ABSTRACTIONS 

STOP BUILDING ABSTRACTIONS I need this small thing Hmm it could also do this Lets introduce this small abstraction to make it applicable here and here Wow this got really complex, new tool it is 

LETS JUST STOP THIS 

THERE IS NO ONE TOOL TO RULE THEM ALL 

PAST SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER SERVER Application cluster Database cluster Data and Background Pipeline 

MONOLITHIC TOOLS IN FRONT OF MICRO-SERVICE ARCHITECTURE? (KEVIN MCGRATH, AUTHOR OF CONDENSATION) 

MICRO-TOOLING (KEVIN MCGRATH, AUTHOR OF CONDENSATION) 

POWER AND CONTROL OVER YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE HARDWARE CLOUD INSTANCES PAAS SERVERLESS 

THE POWER IS IN COMBINING SERVICES, SO DON'T HIDE MORE HERE Service A F1 F2 F3 Service C F1 F2 Service B F1 Service E F1 F2 F3 Service F F1 F2 F3 Service D F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 S3 Kinesis DynamoDB Api Gateway 

CONSTANT NEW FEATURES ARE UNUSABLE DUE TO ABSTRACTIONS 

PROBLEMS WITH MULTI-PROVIDER TOOLING ▸ Always gets dragged down to lowest common denominator ▸ In a Serverless infrastructure you’re not going to move Everything between providers ▸ Small surface area per provider ▸ You want to get all you can out of that provider so you need specialised tooling 

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT 

LETS FIX CLOUDFORMATION 

LETS FIX CLOUDFORMATION NO, STOP IT 

IT NEEDS LOVE AND UX 

MY JOURNEY TO BUILD FORMICA ▸ https://github.com/flomotlik/formica ▸ Wanted to build and play with more AWS services so I needed a good CloudFormation tool ▸ Looked around at existing tools (Sceptre, Stacker, AWLess, Serverless, Gordon, Condensation, …) but all define their own abstractions ▸ Stack environments ▸ Dependencies between stacks ▸ Stack naming, ▸ Language to create the stack ▸ … ▸ So of course I built it using Troposphere so I could have nice python templates and added my own abstraction layer 

MAKEFILE IS MY DEPLOYMENT FRAMEWORK KAPIL THANGAVELU (@KAPILVT) FROM CAPITALONE 

THE UNIX PHILOSOPHY CLOUDFORMATION IS OUR PIPES 

THE UNIX PHILOSOPHY ALSO PIPES ARE OUR PIPES 

DOCUMENTAITON, NOT JUST TOOLING 

DOESN’T MEAN WE CAN’T IMPROVE CF SYNTAX ▸ Serverless/Gordon/Zappa are great for setting up an API Gateway with Lambdas ▸ We could have other tools as preprocessors for specific things ▸ Simple tool to translate HTTP endpoint definition to CF ▸ Tool to create CF templates for CloudWatch Alerts and Metrics 

SUITE OF SMALL FOCUSED TOOLS ▸ Built: ▸ Formica - Deploying CloudFormation templates ▸ AWSIE - Dynamically use CF ids in your shell commands ▸ Ideas: ▸ Orgonaut: Org/Account management and running commands against each command or group ▸ Auditor: Auditing and reporting setup with AWS Config and Cloudtrail across accounts ▸ Pipes: CI/CD setup through CodePipeline/CodeBuild ▸ Watchdog: CloudWatch config tool to make Monitoring and Alerts easier to configure ▸ Work together as a community to highlight those tools and define a best-practice suite 

THEY ARE SMALL THEY ARE SIMPLE GO BUILD SOME 

LEARN CLOUD FORMATION IN-DEPTH 

FLOMOTLIK.ME Florian Motlik AWS/Serverless/Development Process Consultant
 Need help in your infrastructure: flo@flomotlik.me T W I T T E R : @ F L O M O T L I K W E B S I T E : F L O M O T L I K . M E E M A I L : F L O @ F L O M O T L I K . M E 

CONCLUSIONS ▸ Composition and Accessibility, not Features and Abstractions ▸ Build and use small tools that do one thing well ▸ Compose larger systems out of several smaller tools ▸ Go check out Make, its reasonably good ▸ Join the Serverless Slack (Serverless-Forum, https://wt-serverless- seattle.run.webtask.io/serverless-forum-signup?webtask_no_cache=1) T W I T T E R : @ F L O M O T L I K W E B S I T E : F L O M O T L I K . M E E M A I L : F L O @ F L O M O T L I K . M E