This document discusses a workshop on serverless technologies at scale for retail. It will cover deploying a pre-written online shop and backend across AWS services like Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB. Attendees will break existing monolithic retail architectures into smaller serverless components. The document provides backgrounds on the presenters and instructions for an initial exercise to set up accounts before the workshop.

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Serverless (Headless) Retail
Technologies at Scale
R E T 3 0 2
Lee Packham
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
Bastien Leblanc
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
Charlie Wilkinson
Head of Architecture
River Island

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Workshop documentation and guide …

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Related breakouts
Monday, Nov 26
RET207 - Next-Generation e-Commerce Architectures
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm | Aria East, Level 1, Joshua 9, T1
Wednesday, Nov 28
RET205 - Retail Marketing with Machine Learning & Amazon Rekognition
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm | Aria East, Level 2, Mariposa 3, T1
Thursday, Nov 29
DAT347 - How Amazon Migrated Items & Offers for Retail, Marketplace,
& Digital to DynamoDB
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm | Bellagio, Level 1, Degas 2, T1

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About us
Lee Packham
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
• 20 years experience of dev, systems architecture and DevOps across
startup and enterprise; 10 years of AWS experience
• Developer (Python/Go/Java/Scala/C/Node)
• A year at Amazon, working with customers as well as internal teams
on services such as AWS Cloud Development Kit
Twitter: @joolz / Email: leepac@amazon.com

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About us
Bastien Leblanc
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
• 17 years experience in IT with databases, high availability, and
performance
• Two years at AWS working with retail customers in the UK to innovate
and adopt the AWS services
Twitter: @bastleblanc / Email: bastil@amazon.com

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About us
Charlie Wilkinson - Head of Architecture
River Island
• Development background born in a specialist consultancy
environment
• One foot in the nerdy world of developers who get excited about
new tools and fun tech and the other foot in the delivery world
figuring out how to build (and fund!) great new products for
customers
• An evangelist of Lean Agile and now an evangelist for Lean
Architecture

8. If you haven’t already, please complete
Exercise #0 from the documentation
website
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What we are going to do today
• Deploy a pre-written shop written in Django using PostgreSQL
for a database
• Deploy a pre-written backend written in Java

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What we are going to do today
• Deploy a pre-written shop written in Django using PostgreSQL
for a database
• Deploy a pre-written backend written in Java
• An AWS Lambda version of the same backend
• A static mini-site served from Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3) but in the same Amazon CloudFront distribution
• Lambda@Edge to help with traffic rules

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Fishing equipment?

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Why?
• In retail, the CMS is a monolith often purchased and then customized,
and it becomes harder to upgrade
• The backend ends up being something that’s broken apart into
smaller parts as it’s seen as easier, but business logic ends up having
its gravitational pull and updating it becomes scary
• In summary, there’s baggage

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Myth: Serverless means rewriting my stuff
• AWS provides containers for existing code
• Java
• Serverless Java container @ https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-java-container
• NodeJS/JavaScript
• AWS Serverless Express @ https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express
• .NET Core
• AWS Serverless Application (.NET Core) template in the visual studio extension

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Myth: Serverless is just AWS Lambda
• It’s a lot of services, including …

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What was that Exercise #0 thing?
• Bootstrapping your account to do the subsequent exercises
• Deploys parts of all the services ready to be joined together
• Saves you configuring SSH locally by giving you a configured AWS
Cloud9 instance to use instead
• If you haven’t already, or you’re just about ready to run `cdk deploy`,
then do that now as it takes around 15 minutes to complete

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History lesson:
Hairball architecture WMS
OMS
Core
Merchandisin
g
New
orders
Dispatch
result
New orders
Authorisation Payment
capture
Website
Payment
Provider

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Serverless is awesome!

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Serverless order pipeline

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Data lake anyone?

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Important to note for maximum enjoyment
• Don’t panic if you fall behind in the exercises, you can follow along
on the big screen as we walk through the exercises as well!
• Please don’t do things like checking your email–there is a lot to get
through and if you miss a bit it’ll frustrate you, even if you are just
following along on the screen.
• There are plenty of solution architects around to give you a helping
hand. Just pop your hand up and one will come over as soon as
they can.

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24. Thank you!
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