A Jedi's Guide to Migrating to Serverless

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A Jedi’s Guide to Migrating to Serverless CloudConf 2018 Aleksandar Simovic Torino, Italia

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What we’ll be covering • Stepping stones to serverless • Serverless monoliths • Rethinking application processes • The function-by-function approach  “Divide and conquer”

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STAR WARS NERD ALERT If you have Star Wars phobia or mania, take care!

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Serverless means… • No longer need to manage or conﬁgure servers • Pay only for used time • Automatically scaled per usage • Auto-failover and automated high scalability

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Sounds great!

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How do we go serverless?

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“We’ll just build applications on serverless instead of cloud” Initially serverless seems like…

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Simply… Attribution: Simon Wardley

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Also known as “The Luke Skywalker approach”

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“We just don’t think about servers anymore.” “I have a light saber, I am a Jedi.”

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ANTI PATTERN ALERT Welcome to Serverless Monoliths!

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Serverless Monoliths = Dark Side • Hard to maintain and test • Slower starting time • Kept all drawbacks from your previous state • Higher cost

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Bundling many functionalities into a serverless function also means… every time you wanted to use your car,   you would have to assemble it ﬁrst.

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“Now we just don’t think about servers anymore.” Serverless is much more than

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Migrating to serverless requires us to change how we think about application development …not just jump to serverless.

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So, how should we migrate?

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Learn from Luke’s mistakes

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Function-by-function approach “Divide and Conquer” 1. Pick your already isolated services ﬁrst  “the low hanging fruit”

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Function-by-function approach “Divide and Conquer” 2. Rethink and separate services into functions Hint: you don’t pay for your function storage, just usage.

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Function-by-function approach “Divide and Conquer” 3. Divide your business processes into functions

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Case Study: • Can’t predict the popularity of their pens • Have lots of unexpected peaks • Being able to serve is the key business goal • Spending lots on provisioning servers • Keeping lots of servers idle Problems:

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Case Study: • Low hanging fruits   = preprocessors • Migrated all preprocessors into serverless functions • Separated their business process into functions • > 200,000 requests / h

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Case Study: • Converters were eating too much resources • Too expensive Heroku dynos • Less isolation, could collide over resources • Hard to experiment Problems: MINDMUP

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Case Study: • Low hanging fruits   = converters • Migrated all converters into functions • Separated business processes for payments, notiﬁcations, ﬁle storage • Half a million active users each month • Grew 30% in the migration period,   while reduced costs by 30% MINDMUP

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Key points to remember • Identify your isolated problems. • Apply the “function-by-function” approach. • Analyze the remaining monolith services. • Repeat the approach.

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“But can we use this approach everywhere?”

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No.   Look at your current situation.

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Case Study: Migrating User authentication

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Reuse existing serverless components • Plug-and-play authentication and authorization services: AWS Cognito, Azure Active Directory, etc. • Easily add other authentication providers. • User groups. • Automated permission and policy systems.

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Revised Steps • Identify isolated problems. • Check and replace these problems with existing serverless components. • Apply the “function-by-function” approach. • Analyze the remaining monolith services. • Repeat.

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Summary • Serverless is much bigger than just   “no longer managing servers”. • Don’t just rush going serverless. Rethink. • Remember your context. Reuse. • Pick the low hanging “fruits” (services) ﬁrst. • “Divide and conquer” your business processes into functions.