Presentation given at Raleigh DevDay on August 1, 2017 during the Serverless session

2. WIFI: awsDevDay | PASS: CodeHappy
U P N E X T :
Building Serverless Web Applications

3. T H A N K S T O O U R F R I E N D S A T :

4. Who am I?
• Paras Bhuva (bhuparas@amazon.com)
• Solutions Architect at AWS
• Started at Amazon Seller Services in 2012; joined AWS in 2015
• @parasbhuva on twitter

5. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Paras Bhuva, Solutions Architect
8/1/2017
Building Serverless Web Applications

6. AWS compute offerings
VM Task Function
Service EC2 ECS Lambda
H/W OS Runtime
Unit of scale
Level of
abstraction

7. AWS compute offerings
I want to
configure
servers,
storage,
networking,
and my OS
I want to run
servers,
configure
applications,
and control
scaling
Run my
code when
it’s needed
Service EC2 ECS Lambda
How do I
choose?

8. What to expect from the session
• Why Serverless
• Design Patterns
• Group activity + Demo
• One more Demo
• Q&A (if time permits)

9. Why Serverless

10. Servers
How will the application
handle server hardware failure?
How can I control
access from my servers?
When should I decide to
scale out my servers?
When should I decide to
scale up my servers?
What size servers are
right for my budget?
How much remaining
capacity do my servers have?
(AAHHHHHHHHH!!)

11. No servers to provision
or manage
Scales with usage
Never pay for idle Availability and fault
tolerance built in
Serverless means…

12. AWS Lambda

13. AWS Lambda: Serverless computing
Run code without servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume.
Triggered by events or called from APIs:
• PUT to an Amazon S3 bucket
• Updates to Amazon DynamoDB table
• Call to an Amazon API Gateway endpoint
• Mobile app back-end call
• And many more…
Makes it easy to:
• Perform real-time data processing
• Build scalable back-end services
• Glue and choreograph systems

14. Serverless application
SERVICES (ANYTHING)
Changes in
data state
Requests to
endpoints
Changes in
resource state
EVENT SOURCE FUNCTION

15. Using AWS Lambda
Bring your own code
• Node.js, Java, Python,
C#
• Bring your own libraries
(even native ones)
Simple resource model
• Select power rating from
128 MB to 1.5 GB
• CPU and network
allocated proportionately
Flexible use
• Synchronous or
asynchronous
• Integrated with other
AWS services
Flexible authorization
• Securely grant access to
resources and VPCs
• Fine-grained control for
invoking your functions

16. Using AWS Lambda
Authoring functions
• WYSIWYG editor or
upload packaged .zip
• Third-party plugins
(Eclipse, Visual Studio)
Monitoring and logging
• Metrics for requests,
errors, and throttles
• Built-in logs to Amazon
CloudWatch Logs
Programming model
• Use processes, threads,
/tmp, sockets normally
• AWS SDK built in
(Python and Node.js)
Stateless
• Persist data using
external storage
• No affinity or access to
underlying infrastructure

17. AWS Lambda Pricing
• Buy compute time in
100 ms increments
• Low request charge
• No hourly, daily, or
monthly minimums
• No per-device fees
Never pay for idle!
Free Tier
1 million requests and 400,000 GBs of
compute every month, every customer

18. Imagine your business with
no cold servers.
No underutilized hardware.
No containers waiting for
work.
…and no one being paid to
worry about problems that
no longer exist.
• Buy compute time in
100 ms increments
• Low request charge
• No hourly, daily, or
monthly minimums
• No per-device fees
Never pay for idle!

19. Common Serverless Use Cases
Web
Applications
• Static websites
• Complex web
apps
• Packages for
Flask and
Express
Data
Processing
• Real time
• MapReduce
• Batch
Chatbots
• Powering
chatbot logic
Backends
• Apps &
services
• Mobile
• IoT
</></>
Amazon
Alexa
• Powering
voice-enabled
apps
• Alexa Skills
Kit
Autonomous
IT
• Policy engines
• Extending
AWS services
• Infrastructure
management

20. Amazon
S3
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Kinesis
AWS
CloudFormation
AWS
CloudTrail
Amazon
CloudWatch
Amazon
Cognito
Amazon
SNS
Amazon
SES
Cron
events
DATA STORES ENDPOINTS
CONFIGURATION REPOSITORIES EVENT/MESSAGE SERVICES
Lambda Event Sources
… more on the way!
AWS
CodeCommit
Amazon
API Gateway
Amazon
Alexa
AWS
IoT
AWS Step
Functions

21. Amazon API Gateway

22. What is Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for
developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at
any scale. “Front door” for applications to access data, business logic
or functionality from your backend services.
Key Benefits:
Low Cost and Efficient
Performance at any scale
Easily Monitor API Activity
Streamline API Development
Run your APIs without servers
Flexible Security controls
Create RESTful Endpoints for Existing Services

23. Amazon API Gateway
Internet
Mobile Apps
Websites
Services
AWS Lambda
functions
AWS
API Gateway
Cache
Endpoints on
Amazon EC2
All publicly
accessible
endpoints
Amazon
CloudWatch
Monitoring
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon
API Gateway
Any other
AWS service

24. Create a unified
API frontend for
multiple micro-
services
Authenticate and
authorize
requests to a
backend
DDoS protection
and throttling for
your backend
Throttle, meter,
and monetize API
usage by 3rd
party developers
Amazon API Gateway

25. Build, deploy, clone, and roll back
Build APIs with their resources, methods, and settings
Deploy APIs to a stage
• Users can create as many stages as they want, each with its own
throttling, caching, metering, and logging configuration
Clone an existing API to create a new version
• Users can continue working on multiple versions of their APIs
Roll back to previous deployments
• We keep a history of customers’ deployments so they can revert to
a previous deployment

26. API Gateway pricing
$3.50 per million API Gateway requests
Included in the AWS Free Tier
• 1 million API requests per month for 12 months
Data Transfer Out (standard AWS prices)
• $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB
• $0.085/GB for the next 40 TB
• $0.07/GB for the next 100 TB
• $0.05/GB for the next 350 TB
Pricing as of 7/29/17 for US-East region; subject to change; always refer https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/

27. Optional – Dedicated cache pricing
Cache memory
size (GB)
Price per hour
(USD)
0.5 $0.020
1.6 $0.038
6.1 $0.200
13.5 $0.250
28.4 $0.500
58.2 $1.000
118 $1.900
237 $3.800
Pricing as of 7/29/17 for US-East region; subject to change; always refer https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/

28. Design Patterns

29. Monolithic Application

30. Drawbacks of Monolithic Architecture
Hard to Iterate Fast CI/CD Time ConsumingHard to Scale Efficiently
Reliability Challenges

31. Benefits of Microservices Architecture
Increased Agility Easy to Scale Improved Innovation
Reduced Human Errors

32. Monolithic Serverless Web Application

33. Monolithic - What does it look like?
GET /pets
PUT /pets
DELETE /pets
GET /describe/pet/$id
PUT /describe/pet/$id
EVENT DRIVEN ONE LARGE LAMBDA FUNCTION

34. Monolithic - Pros and Cons
• Single Handler
• Handles all GET/PUT/POST/UPDATE/DELETE
• Very Large Lambda Function
• Have to build a routing mechanism
• Larger blast radius
Cons:
Pros:
• Sometimes its easier to comprehend a less
distributed system
• Deployments “could” be faster

35. How can we make this better?

36. Moving from Monolithic to Microservices Architecture
Microservices ArchitectureMonolithic

37. Microservices Serverless Web Application

38. Microservices - What does it look like?
EVENT DRIVEN ONE LAMBDA PER HTTP METHOD
GET /pets
PUT /pets
DELETE /pets
GET /describe/pet/$id
PUT /describe/pet/$id

39. Microservices - Pros and Cons
• Can be harder to debug (X-ray can help with this!)
• Multiple Lambda Functions to Manage (Use SAM!!!!)
Cons:
Pros:
• Easier for teams to work Autonomously
• Separation of components
• Fine grained deployments (Integration testing is important)
• Can be easier to debug
• Agile

40. What does it look like put together?
Amazon
S3
Amazon
API Gateway
S3 stores all of your static
content: CSS, JS, Images, etc.
API Gateway handles all of
your application routing.
Lambda runs all of the logic
behind your website. Such as
a Create/Read/Update/Delete
service.

41. How do I manage it?
MEET SAM
USE SAM TO BUILD TEMPLATES THAT DEFINE
YOUR SERVERLESS APPLICATIONS
DEPLOY YOUR SAM TEMPLATE
WITH AWS CLOUDFORMATION

42. Meet AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)
AWS CloudFormation extension optimized
for serverless
New serverless resource types: functions,
APIs, and tables
Supports anything CloudFormation supports
Open specification (Apache 2.0)
http://bit.ly/AWSSamFarm

43. SAM template
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09’
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Resources:
GetHtmlFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
Properties:
CodeUri: s3://sam-demo-bucket/todo_list.zip
Handler: index.gethtml
Runtime: nodejs4.3
Policies: AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
Events:
GetHtml:
Type: Api
Properties:
Path: /{proxy+}
Method: ANY
ListTable:
Type: AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable

44. SAM template
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09’
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Resources:
GetHtmlFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
Properties:
CodeUri: s3://sam-demo-bucket/todo_list.zip
Handler: index.gethtml
Runtime: nodejs4.3
Policies: AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
Events:
GetHtml:
Type: Api
Properties:
Path: /{proxy+}
Method: ANY
ListTable:
Type: AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable
Tells CloudFormation this is a SAM
template it needs to “transform”
Creates a Lambda function with the
referenced managed IAM policy,
runtime, code at the referenced zip
location, and handler as defined.
Also creates an API Gateway and
takes care of all
mapping/permissions necessary
Creates a DynamoDB table with 5
Read & Write units

45. SAM template
From: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-samfarm/blob/master/api/saml.yaml
<-THIS
BECOMES THIS->

46. Frameworks
Chalice
https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/developer-tools

47. DEMO!

48. Use case – Data processing – sample reference architecture
10:30 AM talk focused on Real time data processing
The Seattle Times uses AWS Lambda to resize images for viewing on different
devices such as desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.

49. Use case – Real time streaming data – sample reference architecture
10:30 AM talk focused on Real time data processing
Localytics processes billions of data points in real-time, and uses Lambda to
process historical and live data stored in S3 or streamed from Kinesis.

50. Resources
Learning path (step by step guide) – https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/serverless-web-app/
Serverless page – https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
Serverless architecture best practices (on YouTube) – https://youtu.be/b7UMoc1iUYw
Serverless Application Model (SAM) deep dive – https://youtu.be/e3lreqpWN0A
AWS Lambda deep dive – https://youtu.be/dB4zJk_fqrU
Developer Tooling – https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/developer-tools/

51. Thank You!

52. Don’t Forget Evaluations!