In today's tech-driven world, an organization's architecture is a competitive differentiator. A key piece of this advantage lies in the ability to move—fast. In this session, we dive into how serverless is changing the way businesses think about speed and cost of innovation. We hear from Comcast on why they made the decision to reinvent with serverless, and the learnings and benefits they've gained along their journey to modern application development.

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Accelerate Innovation and
Maximize Business Value
with Serverless Applications
Linda Lian
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Amazon Web Services
S R V 2 1 2
Christopher Dixon
Vice President,
Product Development Comcast

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
56%
say improvements
increased profits
within the first year
67%
believe they must
pick up the pace to
remain competitive
42%
have adopted
a “digital first”
business posture

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How do digital
innovators enable
rapid innovation?

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Microservices allow you to decompose for agility

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Microservices eliminate the need to focus
on infrastructure as your critical differentiator
Installing, configuring, and managing
my compute infrastructure is critical
to achieving my goals
10%
Having a standardized, flexible, and
on-demand compute environment
is critical to achieving my goals
90%

7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon views serverless as the native architecture
of the cloud
Source: Digital Rewrites The Rules Of Business, Forrester, February 2018
No provisioning,
no management
Automatic
scaling
Pay for
value
Highly available
and secure

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
More
operations
Less
operations
Serverless is an operational construct
Source: Digital Rewrites The Rules Of Business, Forrester, February 2018
VM
ON-PREM
EC2
ECS/EKS
FARGATE
LAMBDA
ELASTIC
BEANSTALK
MYSQL
ON-PREM
STORAGE
ON-PREM
EBS
ON-PREM
HADOOP
ON-PREM
ATHENA
SNS/SQS
STEP
FUNCTIONS
S3 DYNAMODB
MYSQL
ON EC2
RDS ON
MYSQL
AMAZON
REDSHIFT
RDS
AURORA
AURORA
SERVERLESS
AMAZON
MQ
HADOOP
ON EC2
EMR
AMAZON ES

9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
The best way to build microservices is with serverless
Amazon
DynamoDB
AWS Step
Functions
Amazon SQS
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon S3
Amazon
Kinesis
AWS Step
Functions
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon API
Gateway

10. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS serverless advantage
“What took us just a few days to
build using a serverless solution
based on AWS Lambda would
have taken us six months to
build from scratch.”
—
Edmunds
“[We have] experienced near-zero
downtime and near-zero performance
degradation while serving 200–300
million IPO requests per month”
—
Financial Engines
“The size of our team is half of what
is normally needed to build and
operate a site of this scale.”
—
Bustle
“Using AWS Lambda, we’ve increased
cost efficiency by a factor of two.”
—
FINRA

11. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How do you
compose, operate,
and secure?

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Composition best practices
Standardize and automate operations by modeling infrastructure as code
Update applications & infrastructure quickly by automating CI/CD
Improve application performance by increasing observability
Ensure trust by automating security and auditability

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless enables devops best practices
from the start

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless enables security from the start
AWS CloudTrail Amazon CloudWatch AWS X-rayAWS Config
Amazon CognitoAmazon Inspector Amazon VPCAmazon GuardDutyAWS SSO AWS ShieldAWS WAFAWS IAM

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How Amazon builds and runs modern applications
Componentization via services
Organized around business capabilities
Products not projects
Infrastructure automation
Cultural philosophies
Cross-disciplinary teams
Agile, lean practices
Automation tools
No infrastructure to provision or manage
Auto scale by unit of consumption
Pay for value billing model
Built-in availability and fault tolerance

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
“Any organization that designs a system…
will inevitably produce a design whose
structure is a copy of the organization’s
communication structure.”
—
Melvin Conway

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
SkillsCulture Organization
Blockers for innovation
Finance

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
E B ITDA

20. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
“If Amazon.com were starting
today, it would go serverless”
—
Andy Jassy
CEO,AmazonWebServices

21. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Chris Dixon
Vice President, Product Development

22. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

23. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Innovate
“We have a successful history of
engaging, fiercely competing, and
winning through lots of various
cycles, and that’s what you’re going
to see us continue to do.”
—Brian Roberts
CEO
Comcast

24. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Technology Centers of Excellence
SI LI C O N VALLEY
SAN DIEGO
DENVER
WASH I NGTO N D. C .
V I RGI NI A
NEW YO RK
AU STI N
SEATTLE
I NDI A
CHINA
TECHNOLOGY CENTERS
PH I LADELPH I A
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

25. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Comcast and startups: accelerating innovation
Streamsage
Investments in key
strategic partners
Building our technology
capabilities and
product portfolio with
strategic acquisitions
Comcast Ventures
investments in promising,
future-looking companies
Accelerating startups
through LIFT Labs

26. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Comcast and Amazon
“We have deepened our strategic relationship
with AWS, making the industry’s leading cloud
our preferred public cloud provider… Over the
years, we have leveraged the breadth and depth
of AWS’s services, including compute, storage,
and analytics. In that process, we’ve found AWS
to be extremely customer focused.”
—Jan Hofmeyr
Chief Network Officer
Comcast

27. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless success: a three-part story
Technology
Value Organization

28. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Ben Franklin: Philadelphia entrepreneur
• “The first American”
• Founding father
• Author
• Scientist
• Inventor
• Journalist

29. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Part 1: Technology
“Well done is better
than well said.”

30. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Performance, scale, and speed
Advantages:
• Rapidly scale to (almost) any demand
• Streamlined DevOps support
• Variety of languages supported
• VPCs enable near-network support
• AWS modules play nicely together
• Leverage AWS best-practice across
many diverse solutions
• Extremely resilient across regions
• Direct costs per project

31. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Other considerations
Other things to think about:
• Know what your own specialties are
• Certain languages not supported
• Need to deal with cold starts, concurrent
read/write limits, etc.
• Migration from non-AWS tech stack
requires focus and commitment

32. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Bot/DDoS defense
Amazon Redshift, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Elastic
Beanstalk*
“Comcast does a lot of security work
behind the scenes—providing
continuous monitoring using tools
like automatic updates to the
modems and gateways customers
lease from us and our malware
detection service.”
—Noopur Davis
Chief Product and
Information Security Officer
Comcast

33. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Bot defense details
• 22+ billion rows (15 months
of event data available)
• 4+ TB stored
• 50,000+ queries per day
• Sub-second response times

34. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
DDoS/token cracking service
• DDoS from Friendly Neighbors
can negatively impact
core services
• Serverless approach* offers
scale to protect systems
• t3.micro instances over 2 regions with
auto-scaling up to 20 instances
• 2 x t3.micro in US-East-1—average
latency 1.2ms, 11MM req/day
• 1 x t3.micro in US-West-2—average
latency 1.4ms, 5MM req/day

35. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Netflix on X1
API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis
“Netflix is a great partner, and we are
excited to offer its services to our
customers in new ways that provide
them with more choice, value and
flexibility. The seamless integration of
Netflix with the vast Xfinity
entertainment library on X1 present a
unique and comprehensive experience
for customers.”
—Sam Schwartz
Chief Business Development Officer
Comcast Cable

36. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Comcast Integration to Support Netflix
boto3
Proxy
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS Lambda
Custom
Authorizer
Amazon Kinesis
Data Streams
Amazon DynamoDB
AWS Secrets Manager
Amazon SNS
On Premise
X1 Services Sales Billing
Provisioning ReportingBilling
PaymentsCare ToolsMessaging
AWS Cloud
AWS Lambda
Amazon Redshift
Amazon S3

37. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Comcast / Netflix Integration Highlights
• Multiple Python based Lambda functions @ 512Mb
• 160 Million transactions/month on average
• 220 TPS peak load with 1.2 secs P95 response times
(multiple backend calls)
• 2 developers end-to-end
• 4 months to production

38. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Part 2: Value
“A penny saved is
a penny earned.”

39. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Value/impact lifecycle
1
2
3
4

40. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Value/native solutions

41. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Value discussion
• Macro-level savings are easy
to identify and manage
• Intra-company savings are
more complex
• How important is time-to-market?
• How are on-premise costs for running
services calculated?
• Are you using AWS services efficiently?
• Is there something else driving the
serverless value proposition?

42. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Value summary
“An Investment in Knowledge
Pays the Best Interest”

43. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Part 3: Organization
“Tell me and I forget, teach me
and I may remember, involve me
and I learn.”

44. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How do you measure success?
• Traditional measurements
• Site traffic
• Revenue
• SLAs and performance
• New measurements/KPIs
• DevOps/CI/CD maturity
• Size/composition of team
• Cost per activity

45. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
What else is important?
• The right team needs challenges
• Personal and professional growth
• Hard problems
• Ability to learn and apply new methods
• And also great stories:
• Governance or performance?
• Roadmaps or releases?
• Customer features or feedback?
• Pilots or production?

46. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Evolve
“All [teams] are divided
into three classes: those
that are immovable,
those that are movable,
and those that move.”

47. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Summary
“You’re trying to reduce friction. You’re
trying to introduce surprise moments
and delight. And you’re trying to drive
consistency and convenience. Those
are all the things any of us want out of a
customer experience. And we’ve taken
that approach not only with how our
customers interact with our products,
but also how our employees can get
their work done as well.”
—Charlie Herrin
Chief Customer Experience Officer
Comcast

48. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Chris Dixon
Chris_Dixon@Comcast.com
Linda Lian
Lndal@amazon.com

49. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.