Serverless computing enables you to build and run applications without the need to provision, manage servers, or worry about the availability or scalability of your solutions. With serverless computing, you can build web, mobile, and IoT backends, run stream processing or big data workloads, run chatbots, and more. In this session, learn how to get started with serverless computing with AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and more.

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Driving Innovation
with Serverless Applications
Zlatan Dzinic
Senior Solution Architect
Amazon Web Services
G P S B U S 2 1 2
Nick Naddaf
Specialized Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
About me
Cape Town-ian in Orange County 🇧🇦🇿🇦🇺🇸
Alma Mater – University of Cape Town
zlatan@amazon.com, @ZlatanDzinic
Senior Solution Architect – Amazon Web Services
Zlatan Dzinic
Focus
Serverless
Containers
AI
Machine Learning
Previously
Director – Consulting Services
Worked with:
Microsoft Ranger Teams
Microsoft Research
microsoft.com
AWS – Professional services

4. About me
naddafn@amazon.com
Specialized Solution Architect – Amazon Web Services
Nick Naddaf
Focus
Serverless
Containers
IoT
Big Data
Previously
Consulting Services and
product development
Focusing on web, mobile
development.

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
No servers to provision
or manage
Scales with usage
Never pay for idle Availability and fault
tolerance built in
Serverless means…

7. Evolution of Business Logic
Monolith Microservices Functions

8. Splitting
Monoliths
Ten Years Ago

9. Splitting
Monoliths
Ten Years Ago
XML & SOAP

10. Splitting
Monoliths
TenFiveYears Ago

11. REST JSON
Fast binary
encodingsSplitting
Monoliths
Five Years Ago

12. Splitting
Monoliths
TenFive Years Ago

16. Microservices
Five Years Ago

18. Microservices
Five Years Agoto Functions
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
SQS
Standard building brick
services provide standardized
platform capabilities

19. Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
DynamoDB
Microservices
to Functions
Business Logic
Glue between
the bricks
Standard building brick
services provide standardized
platform capabilities

20. Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
DynamoDB
Microservices
to Functions

21. Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
DynamoDB
Microservices
to Functions

22. Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
DynamoDB
Microservices
to FunctionsEphemeral

23. Microservices
to
Functions
Ephemeral

24. Microservices
to
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Functions
Ephemeral

25. Microservices
to
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
DynamoDB
Functions
Ephemeral

26. Microservices
to
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Functions
Ephemeral

27. Amazon SNS
Amazon S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
DynamoDB
Microservices
to
Functions
Ephemeral
When the system is
idle, it shuts down and
costs nothing to run

28. Evolution of Business Logic
Monolith Microservices Functions

29. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Services (anything)
Changes in
data state
Requests to
endpoints
Changes in
resource state
Event source Function
Node.js
Python
Java
C#
Go
Serverless applications

30. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Common Lambda use cases
Web
Applications
Data
Processing
ChatbotsBackends
Amazon
Alexa
IT
Automation
Static websites
Complex web apps
Packages for Flask
and Express
Real time
MapReduce
Batch
Powering chatbot
logic
Apps & services
Mobile
IoT
Powering voice-
enabled apps
Alexa Skills Kit
Policy engines
Extending AWS
services
Infrastructure
management

31. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Stateless
Highly scalable, self-healing, available
Containerized microservices
AWS serverless platform
• AWS Lambda
• AWS Step Functions
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
• Amazon MQ / Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
Dynamic/managed allocation of resources
Amazon Route 53 – DNS
Serverless Architecture
C#
C#
C#
User/Client
Alexa
Mobile
Pho ne
S3
HTTPS
REST
REST
REST
Wordflow
Steps
SQS
SNS
Wordflow
Steps
ElastiCache
RDS
Dynamo DB
S3CloudFront
HTTP
Step FunctionsWorker Process
API Gateway
Instance
Workflow

32. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

33. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Establish our testing/validation model
We want to make sure
our code:
We want to make sure
our serverless service:
We want to make sure our
entire application/
infrastructure:
is without syntax issues
meets company standards
for format
compiles
is sufficiently tested at the
code level via unit tests
functions as it is supposed
to in relation to other
components
has appropriate mechanisms
to handle failures up or
down stream
functions end to end
follows security best practices
handles scaling demands

34. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Building a deployment package
Node.js & Python
.zip file consisting of
your code and any
dependencies
Use npm/pip to
install libraries
All dependencies
must be at root level
Java
Either .zip file with all
code/dependencies,
or standalone .jar
Use Maven/Eclipse
IDE plugins
Compiled class &
resource files at root
level, required jars in
/lib directory
C# (.NET Core)
Either .zip file with all
code/dependencies,
or a standalone .dll
Use NuGet/
VisualStudio plugins
All assemblies (.dll)
at root level
Go
.zip file consisting of
your Go binary and
any dependencies
Use “go get” to
install dependencies

35. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS CodeBuild
Fully managed build service that can compile source
code, runs tests, and produces software packages
Scales continuously and processes multiple
builds concurrently
Can consume environment variables from AWS SSM
Parameter Store
Can run in your VPC
Supports dependency caching
NOTE
NOTE

36. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
buildspec.yml example
version: 0.1
environment_variables:
plaintext:
"INPUT_FILE": "saml.yaml”
"S3_BUCKET": ""
phases:
install:
commands:
- npm install
pre_build:
commands:
- eslint *.js
build:
commands:
- npm test
post_build:
commands:
- aws cloudformation package --template $INPUT_FILE --s3-
bucket $S3_BUCKET --output-template post-saml.yaml
artifacts:
type: zip
files:
- post-saml.yaml
- beta.json

37. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
buildspec.yml example
version: 0.1
environment_variables:
plaintext:
"INPUT_FILE": "saml.yaml”
"S3_BUCKET": ""
phases:
install:
commands:
- npm install
pre_build:
commands:
- eslint *.js
build:
commands:
- npm test
post_build:
commands:
- aws cloudformation package --template $INPUT_FILE --s3-
bucket $S3_BUCKET --output-template post-saml.yaml
artifacts:
type: zip
files:
- post-saml.yaml
- beta.json
Variables to be used by phases of build
Examples for what you can do in
the phases of a build:
You can install packages or run commands to
prepare your environment in ”install”
Run syntax checking, commands in “pre_build”
Execute your build tool/command in “build”
Test your app further or ship a container image
to a repository in post_build
Create and store an artifact in S3

38. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Testing tools
Code inspection/
test coverage:
Landscape
https://landscape.io/
(only for Python)
CodeClimate
https://codeclimate.com/
Coveralls.io https://coveralls.io/
Mocking/
stubbing tools:
https://github.com/atlassian/localstack
“A fully functional local AWS
cloud stack. Develop and test
your cloud apps offline!”
Includes:
https://github.com/spulec/moto
boto mock tool
https://github.com/mhart/dynalite
DynamoDB testing tool
https://github.com/mhart/kinesalite
Kinesis testing tool
API interface/
UI testing:
Runscope
https://www.runscope.com/
API Monitoring/Testing
Ghost Inspector
https://ghostinspector.com/
Web interface testing

39. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

40. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Metrics and logging are a universal right!
CloudWatch Metrics:
7 Built in metrics
for API-Gateway
API Calls Count
Latency
4XXs
5XXs
Integration Latency
Cache Hit Count
Cache Miss Count
Error and Cache metrics support
averages and percentiles
7 Built in metrics
for Lambda
Invocation Count,
Invocation duration
Invocation errors
Throttled Invocation
Iterator Age
DLQ Errors
Concurrency
Can call “put-metric-data” from your
function code for custom metrics

41. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

42. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Metrics and logging are a universal right!
CloudWatch Logs:
API Gateway
Logging
2 Levels of logging,
ERROR and INFO
Optionally log
method
request/body
content
Set globally in
stage, or override
per method
Lambda Logging
Logging directly
from your code
with your
language’s
equivalent of
console.log()
Basic request
information
included
Log Pivots
Build metrics based
on log filters
Jump to logs that
generated metrics
Export logs to AWS
ElastiCache or S3
Explore with Kibana
or Athena/
QuickSight

43. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Metrics and logging are a universal right!
CloudWatch Logs:
API Gateway
Logging
2 Levels of logging,
ERROR and INFO
Optionally log
method
request/body
content
Set globally in
stage, or override
per method
Lambda Logging
Logging directly
from your code
with your
language’s
equivalent of
console.log()
Basic request
information
included
Log Pivots
Build metrics based
on log filters
Jump to logs that
generated metrics
Export logs to AWS
ElastiCache or S3
Explore with Kibana
or Athena/
QuickSight

44. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon API Gateway custom access logging

45. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

46. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS X-Ray
Trace requests View service mapRecord traces Analyze issues
View the service map
to see trace data such
as latencies, HTTP
statuses, and metadata
for each service
Drill into the service
showing unusual
behavior to identify
the root issue
X-Ray combines the
data gathered from
each service into
singular units
called traces
AWS X-Ray traces
requests made to
your application
X-Ray collects data
about the request from
each of the underlying
applications services
it passes through
860 traces min
avg – 0.15 ms
Index DynamoDB

47. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Application instrumentation (Node.js)

48. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
X-Ray service map

49. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
X-Ray trace timeline

50. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How do I figure out what’s wrong?
These tools are here, so use them!
1. Turn on X-Ray now
look at wrapping your own calls with it via the X-Ray SDKs
2. Don’t underestimate the power of logging in Lambda
Simple “debug: in functionX” statements work great and are
easy to find in CloudWatch Logs
3. The most valuable metrics are the ones closest
to your customer/use-case
How many gizmos did this function call/create/process/etc

51. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Lambda Dead Letter Queues
“By default, a failed Lambda function invoked asynchronously is
retried twice, and then the event is discarded. Using Dead Letter
Queues (DLQ), you can indicate to Lambda that unprocessed events
should be sent to an Amazon SQS queue or Amazon SNS topic
instead, where you can take further action.”
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/dlq.html
Turn this on! (for async use-cases)
Monitor it via an SQS Queue length metric/alarm
If you use SNS, send the messages to something durable and/or
a trusted endpoint for processing
Can send to Lambda functions in other regions
If and when things go “boom” DLQ can save your invocation
event information
☠️
✉️
Q

52. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

53. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Release processes have four major phases
Integration tests
with other systems
Load testing
UI tests
Penetration testing
Source Build Test Production
Check-in source code
such as .java files
Peer review new code
Compile code
Unit tests
Style checkers
Code metrics
Create deployable
artifacts
Deployment
to production
environments

54. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Release processes levels
Continuous integration
Continuous delivery
Continuous deployment
Source Build Test Production

55. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Continuous delivery service for fast and reliable
application updates
Model and visualize your software release process
Builds, tests, and deploys your code every time
there is a code change
Integrates with third-party tools and AWS
AWS CodePipeline

56. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
An example minimal developer’s pipeline:
MyBranch—Source
Source
CodeCommit
MyApplication
Build
test-build-source
CodeBuild
MyDev—Deploy
create-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
execute-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
Run-stubs
AWS Lambda
This pipeline:
Three stages
Builds code artifact
One Development environment
Uses SAM/CloudFormation to deploy artifact and other
AWS resources
Has Lambda custom actions for running my own
testing functions

57. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Build
Source
An example minimal production pipeline
Code review
via Pull Requests
(NEW In CodeCommit)
Source
CodeCommit
MyApplication
test-build-source
CodeBuild
Deploy Testing
create-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
execute-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
Run-stubs
AWS Lambda
Deploy Staging
create-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
execute-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
Run-API-test
Runscope
QA-Sign-off
Manual Approval
Review
Deploy Prod
create-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
execute-changeset
AWS CloudFormation
Post-Deploy-Slack
AWS Lambda
Lint/syntax check
Unit tests pass
Code successfully compiles
Application
deploys successfully
Mocked/stubbed
integration tests
Application
deploys successfully
Tests against real services
(potentially against
production dependencies)
Deploy canaries
Complete wait
period successfully
Deploy 100%

58. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Uses AWS SAM to deploy serverless applications
Supports Lambda Alias Traffic Shifting enabling canaries
and blue|green deployments
Can rollback based on CloudWatch Metrics/Alarms
Pre/Post-Traffic Triggers can integrate with other services
(or even call Lambda functions)
AWS CodeDeploy + Lambda

59. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
CodeDeploy comes with
a number of added capabilities:
Custom deployment configurations like:
“Canary 5% for 1 hour”
“Linear 20% every 1 hour”
Notification events via SNS on success/failure/rollback
Console with visibility on deploy status, history, and rollbacks
AWS CodeDeploy + Lambda

60. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environments, Stages, Versioning, & Canaries?
A few best practices:
1. Use blue|green or canaries for production deployments
with a rollback as automated as possible
2. In Lambda Versioning is useful if you need to support
multiple versions to multiple consumers/invocation points
3. In API-Gateway Stages work similarly and are useful if you
need to support multiple API versions
4. Try to always have separate “stacks” for Development,
Testing, Staging, Production environments
1. Do not use Stages or Versioning for this
2. Think about having different accounts all together for different environments

61. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Start with AWS CodeStar

62. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
aws.amazon.com/serverless

63. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

64. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

65. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.