Off-by-none: Issue #20

January 15, 2019

Let's get hands-on...

Welcome to Issue #20 of Off-by-none. It’s great to have you here! 🤘🏻

Last week we sifted through quite a bit of serverless content to start the new year. This week we’re going to get a bit more hands-on, and dig into some useful applications of serverless that we can start using right now. We also have some more insights into the future of serverless, plus some really compelling research regarding TCO of serverless infrastructures.

We’ve got a bunch of stuff to get to today, so let’s get into it! 👇

When your downstream systems aren’t infinitely scalable… 😳

There is an ongoing debate about the “serverlessness” of certain services and downstream systems. While that may be a useful exercise from an operational perspective, from a practical standpoint, the bigger issue has to do with scalability. It is likely that most of the services that make up your serverless applications will not scale as well as Lambda. This can create significant pressure on downstream services during heavy traffic spikes, sometimes resulting in unplanned downtime. So what can we do when certain parts of our application simply can’t scale?

An extremely useful pattern is to distribute an event to one or more SQS queues using SNS. This gives us the ability to use multiple queues to “buffer” events so that we can throttle processing to alleviate pressure on downstream resources. For example, if we have an event that needs to write information to a relational database AND trigger another process that calls a third-party API, this pattern would be a great fit.

In my new post, How To: Use SNS and SQS to Distribute and Throttle Events, I walk you through how to automate this and add it to your serverless applications. Full working code examples are provided and explained, so give it look, and see if this would be right for your application.

When you want more serverless use cases… 🙋‍♀️

Last week I shared some interesting serverless use cases that I came across. I think it’s helpful to see how other people are using serverless, and then be able to apply some of those ideas to your own systems. Here are a few I found this week.

Creating A Serverless Answer For eCommerce shows us how a team created a completely serverless ecommerce system and the resulting benefits. The quote at the end of the article may seem a bit obvious to those of use who live and breathe serverless, but it sums up the business case quite nicely: “By moving to a Serverless solution, businesses can achieve an affordable solution that will rapidly scale up and down with demand, removing wasted resources and expenditure during down times, while ensuring you’re able to handle larger peak volumes whenever they occur.”

Bob Thomas shows us how and why KYD joined the serverless train. There are some great insights into why they went serverless as well as some code examples for CI/CD with Gitlab.

There are plenty of third party ESPs to choose from, but Vinicius Kiatkoski Neves gives us a complete walk-through and shows us how to send e-mails through AWS SES and Lambda.

When serverless security should be your #1 concern… 🔒

Marcia Villalba is back with another great interview from re:Invent. This week she is Talking about Serverless Security with Ory Segal.

Speaking of Vegas and serverless security, I came across this talk from Erez Yalon at BSides called Serverless Infections. It has some really good security tips in there, plus there are some demos that show how hackers can both infiltrate and exfiltrate your serverless functions.

And don’t forget that Ory Segal and I are hosting a Foundations of Lambda Security webinar on January 24, 2019 at 11am ET. Make sure you signup to see how the OWASP Top 10 applies to your serverless applications.

When you want to build serverless apps on something other than AWS… ⚡️

I’m a big AWS fan, and with 70% of the serverless market, it’s hard to ignore. But others continue to make strides in the space, and lots of developers are utilizing the service offerings of other cloud providers. Here are few interesting resource I came across this week that do serverless sans AWS.

Serverless Notes is a site dedicated to helping developers build applications on Azure. They’ve recently launched there Azure Serverless Tips series with helpful bits of information from technology leaders and experienced people, all in one place.

Another great resource is the Azure Serverless Community Library. Think of it a bit like the AWS Serverless Application Repository. I browsed through these and there are A LOT of covered use cases already built for you.

And if you’re using the Microsoft cloud and you need to Scale Azure Functions to Make 500,000 Requests to Weather.com in Under 3 minutes, David Barkol has you covered.

And let’s not leave Google out! Wassim Chegham wrote a great post called Building Your Next Serverless Application: The Complete Guide. It is an in-depth, step-by-step, code included walk-through that’s a great resource for those working in the Google Cloud.

When you think about the future of serverless… 🔮

Nate Taggart from Stackery has some predictions for Serverless in 2019. According to him, we can look forward to monolith conversions and executive buy-in, but will face resistance from the IT-Industrial complex.

Ben Moore from ChannelLife New Zealand reports that KBV research predicts the Serverless architecture market to reach $14B by 2024. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 23.4%. 🐨

Adrian Colyer has some thoughts on the Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back paper that was released recently. Lots of us saw the paper as highly critical of serverless, especially since it focused on use case that were not a good fit. Adrian has a bit of a different perspective on this.

And whenever we look at the future, it’s always helpful to take look at the past. Our friends over at Thundra have a nice post that recaps their journey in 2018. It is really exciting to see companies in the serverless space growing up and being successful. There are so many opportunities in the serverlesss space, and Thundra is just one example.

When you’re finally thinking about migrating to serverless… 🤷‍♂️

Ready to move all your applications to a serverless architecture? Yan Cui says Not so FaaS! He points out that there are lots of viable use cases for serverless, but that user experience should trump everything else. TLDR; don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole, even if the square peg is serverless. 😜

The team at Nuweba has put together a serverless ebook to help you understand The Top 4 Challenges In Serverless. Handy little guide if you’re new to the serverless world.

There’s also an interesting interview with Red Hat’s Michael Hausenblas on learning to walk before running into a Serverless mess. There are some good points in here about the operations culture changing as well as pointing out a few places where serverless might not make sense.

And if you are planning on going serverless, the biggest culture shock will most likely be with observability, or the lack thereof. The team over at Epsagon has an upcoming webinar that will explain Serverless Monitoring in Practice. Definitely worth a look.

What to do if you can’t let go of your Ruby or PHP framework… 👋

Are you a Ruby on Rails developer that is feeling left out by this whole serverless thing? Check out Jets: Ruby Serverless Framework, and see if that gets you excited.

What about all the PHP fans? I’ve heard that Laravel is doing some work to make the framework more serverless, but in the meantime, Rob Allen will show you how to run Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda. AWS also has a post that can help you as well.

When you’re curious if serverless will actually reduce your costs… 💰

Remember that Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back paper that we previous mentioned? Well it also got Yan Cui fired up. He tells us why You are thinking about serverless costs all wrong and points out that TCO (total cost of ownership) is the better metric to evaluate costs.

Kevin O’Hara shared a typical #AWS bill for a startup building their MVP primarily on serverless technology like Lambda. Production APIs, static sites, databases, and messaging all for under a few bucks a month. This is not uncommon.

Mark Schwartz had some recent thoughts on Switching Costs and Lock-In that are worth reading. However, the new Generating Value Through IT Agility and Business Scalability with AWS Serverless Platform report is definitely worth a skim. Some of the highlights include a 33% increase in developer productivity, 18% increase in applications/logic created, and an over 200% increase in the number of features. Add to this massive drops in unexpected downtime and MTTR, 60% lower operations costs, and a 53% reduction in infrastructure and hardware costs over a five year period. This is some great data if you’re trying to make the serverless case to the higher-ups.

When you’re looking for some interesting serverless reads and resources… 📚

Your Quintessential Guide to AWS Athena is just that. No need to be paying for RedShift if you store your data correctly in S3.

Mike Roberts and John Chapin over at Symphonia created a lambda-benchmarking project that generates and saves benchmarks for cold start latencies of the AWS Lambda service. It will be really interesting to see these latencies decrease as AWS continues to optimize for them.

And Ray Camden has a new article about Adding Serverless Functions to Your Netlify Static Site. I think I’ve read most of Ray’s books, so it will be awesome if he becomes a serverless advocate too!

When you get overly excited about AWS announcements…🗣

There was an AWS Fargate Price Reduction – Up to 50%. This is thanks to the Firecracker virtualization technology they announced at re:Invent last year. Good news for those of you that still need containers.

AWS also announced Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility). I wouldn’t suggest building greenfield on it, but if you are moving an existing workload, this could make your managing a MongoDB cluster nightmares go away.

Speaking of migrating MongoDB, AWS Database Migration Service Now Supports Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility as a target. Live migrate right from your replica sets or sharded clusters.

And AWS Step Functions Now Supports Resource Tagging, which is pretty cool. The more you tag the better. Read How To: Tag Your Lambda Functions for Smarter Serverless Applications for a bunch of reasons why.

Serverless Star of the Week ⭐️

There is a very long list of people that are doing #ServerlessGood and contributing to the Serverless community. These people deserve recognition for their efforts. So each week, I will mention someone whose recent contribution really stood out to me. I love meeting new people, so if you know someone who deserves recognition, please let me know.

This week’s star is Heitor Lessa (@heitor_lessa). Heitor is a Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS that focuses on serverless. Beside being an all around nice guy and serverless expert, Heitor is the host of the Build on Serverless Twitch series. The first season featured a number of great guests with lots of hands-on, real-world serverless problem solving. Season 2 is in the works, so be sure to RSVP so you can learn more best practices while watching Heitor and his guests build a Serverless Airline App from scratch. Great stuff!

Final Thoughts 🤔

I realize that this newsletter keeps getting longer every week. Maybe I’m looking too hard for serverless content, or maybe there is just a lot more of it out there. Either way, I feel like it is getting a little unwieldy. There is obviously a lot of information to share each week, but I don’t want it to be too overwhelming. Should I cut this down a bit? Do you like all this content? Should I add more!? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Off-by-none. Please send me your feedback and suggestions so I can continue to make this newsletter better. Feel free to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or email and let me know your thoughts, criticisms, or how you’d like to contribute to Off-by-none.

See you next time,
Jeremy