Building a serverless cloud service

Serverless is a cloud architecture for executing code on-demand,
without running any application servers or managing any server
infrastructure. In this talk, we're taking a look at how to build a
cloud service in a serverless fashion using Python, AWS API Gateway,
and AWS Lambda.

John Chang is a co-founder and principal engineer at SURFnCODE, a
startup-that-creates-startups based in Matosinhos. Before coming to
Portugal, John worked for more than 15 years in senior software
engineering positions at Apple in California and Skype and Microsoft
in Europe.

1. Building a Serverless Cloud Service John Chang <john@surfncode.io> Python Porto #10
2. A Little Context AWS EC2 2015 2010 2005 2000 ☁ JSON REST AJAX
3. A Little Context Heroku Google App Engine AWS EB PaaS IaaS 2015 2010 2005 2000 ☁ AWS EC2
4. A Little Context Heroku Google App Engine AWS EB FaaS AWS Lambda GC Functions Azure Functions 2015 2010 2005 2000 PaaS IaaS ☁ AWS EC2
5. • Serverless Computation == FaaS • … also Serverless Databases • “Serverless” means transparent scaling What is Serverless? FaaS AWS Lambda GC Functions Azure Functions
6. Example “Hello World” on AWS Lambda
10. So What? • Zero admin • Truly transparent scaling • No vendor lock-in • Lower costs ☁ { }
11. FaaS Pricing • Billed by 1) GB-second rate + 2) Cost per request • 128 MB × (1 GB/1024 MB) × 100 ms × (1 s/1000 ms) = 0.0125 GB-s • 400,000 GB-s, 1M requests free per month
12. • More abstraction • More systems complexity • Latency • Vendor lock-in (sort of…) So What? • Zero admin • Transparent scaling • No vendor lock-in • Lower costs ☁ { }
13. FaaS Platforms AWS Lambda Supported Python 2.7, 3.6, 3.7 ✅ Google Cloud Functions Beta Python 3.7.1 ⚠ Azure Functions Experimental (1.x), N/A (2.x)
14. FaaS Use Cases • Event-oriented, short-lived (minutes) execution 1. Trigger 2. Data pipeline 3. API service
15. Trigger • On-demand or scheduled tasks Action Lambda Event { }
16. Ex: Lunchbot Action Lambda Event Post to Slack webhook Scrape Instagram, Build notification Daily timer { }
17. Ex: Newsbot Action Lambda Event Post to backend Query news feeds and apply filters Hourly timer { }
18. Ex: Server Health Alarms Action Lambda Event Post to Slack webhook Build notification Environment health check { }
19. Data Pipeline • Real-time log/file/media processing • e.g. resize and compress image upon upload Lambda Sink Storage Source { }
20. Ex: Server Log Analytics • Can be used with AWS Athena (“serverless” SQL) Lambda Sink Storage Source Parse user agent strings Post to Kinesis Firehose Web server access logs Write to S3 { }
21. API Service • Microservices, Proxy backends Lambda API Gateway Data Store Client { }
22. Ex: Proxy Backend Lambda API Gateway Data Store Client Rewrite responses Listen for requests Web app frontend Third-party API service { }
23. Example SURFnCODE Lunchbot
25. Ex: Lunchbot Action Lambda Event Post to Slack webhook Scrape Instagram, Build notification Daily timer { }
37. • Serverless Computation == FaaS • … also Serverless Databases • “Serverless” means transparent scaling What is Serverless? FaaS AWS Lambda GC Functions Azure Functions
38. What is SURFnCODE? • Startup-that-makes-startups • Based in Matosinhos • *+,-./012345 • We’re hiring! 6 careers.surfncode.io (even Python newbies)