introduction to serverless computing and aws lambda - aws il meetup

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Boaz Ziniman, Technical Evangelist, AWS

@ziniman

Introduction to Serverless computing & AWS Lambda

Israel AWS User Group - November 2017


ServersHow 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 toscale up my servers?

What size servers areright for my budget?

How much remainingcapacity do my servers have?

(AAHHHHHHHHH!!)


What isserverless?

Build and run applicationswithout thinking about servers


Let’s take a look at the evolution of computing

Physical ServersDatacenters

Virtual ServersDatacenters

Virtual Serversin the cloud


Each progressive step was better




• Higher utilization

• Faster provisioning speed

• Improved uptime

• Disaster recovery

• Hardware independence

• Trade CAPEX for OPEX

• More scale

• Elastic resources

• Faster speed and agility

• Reduced maintenance

• Better availability and

fault tolerance


But there are still limitations



• Trade CAPEX for OPEX

• More scale

• Elastic resources

• Faster speed and agility

• Reduced maintenance

• Better availability and

fault tolerance

• Still need to administer

virtual servers

• Still need to manage

capacity and utilization

• Still need to size

workloads

• Still need to manage

availability, fault tolerance

• Still expensive to run

intermittent jobs



Evolving to serverless

SERVERLESS

Virtual serversin the cloud

Physical serversin datacenters

Virtual serversin datacenters


No server is easier to manage than any server

All of these responsibilitiesgo away

Provisioning and utilizationAvailability and fault toleranceScalingOperations and management

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Serverless with AWS Lambda


Deliver on demand, never pay for idle

EVENT DRIVEN CONTINUOUS SCALING PAY BY USAGE


What does Serverless mean?

No servers to provision or manage

Scale with your usage

Built in availability and fault-tolerance

Never pay for idle/unused capacity


Serverless runs on functions

• Functions are the unit of deployment and scale• This scales per request!• Skip the boring parts, skip the hard parts


How it works?


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


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


Example event sources

Data stores Endpoints

Configuration repositories Event/message sources

Amazon S3 Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Cognito

Amazon IoT AWS Step Functions

Amazon Alexa

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CodeCommit

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon SES Amazon SNS Cron events

Amazon API Gateway

AWS Cloudformation

…and more!


Lambda Use Cases


#1: 3-Tier Web Application


3-Tier web application

Data stored in Amazon

DynamoDB

Dynamic content in AWS Lambda

Amazon API Gateway

Browser

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon S3

Browser

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon S3

Amazon API Gateway

Dynamic content in AWS Lambda

Data store in Amazon DynamoDB


Amazon API Gateway AWS

LambdaAmazon

DynamoDB

AmazonS3

Amazon CloudFront

• Bucket Policies• ACLs

• OAI• Geo-Restriction• Signed Cookies• Signed URLs• DDOS

AuthZ

IAM

Serverless web app security

• Throttling• Caching• Usage Plans

Browser

IAM


Amazon API Gateway AWS

LambdaAmazon

DynamoDB

AmazonS3

Amazon CloudFront

• Bucket Policies• ACLs

• OAI• Geo-Restriction• Signed Cookies• Signed URLs• DDOS

AuthZ

Serverless web app security

• Throttling• Caching• Usage Plans

Browser

Amazon CloudFront

• HTTPS• Disable Host

Header Forwarding

AWS WAF

IAMIAM


Amazon API Gateway

AWSLambda

AmazonDynamoDB

AmazonS3

Amazon CloudFront

• Access Logs in S3 Bucket• Access Logs in S3 Bucket

• CloudWatch Metrics-https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/reporting/

Serverless web app monitoring

AWS WAF• WebACL Testing• Total Requests• Allowed/Blocked

Requests by ACL

logslogs

• Invocations• Invocation Errors• Duration• Throttled

Invocations

• Latency• Throughput• Throttled Reqs

• Latency• Count• Cache Hit/Miss• 4XX/5XX Errors

Streams

AWSCloudTrail

BrowserCustom CloudWatch

Metrics & Alarms


Serverless web app lifecycle management

• AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model) - blogAWS

Lambda

Amazon API Gateway

AWS CloudFormation

AmazonS3

AmazonDynamoDB

Package & Deploy

Code/Packages/Swagger

Serverless Template

Serverless Template

w/ CodeUri

package deploy

CI/CD Tools


http://bit.ly/ServerlessShop

https://github.com/patrick-michelberger/serverless-shop


#2: automation


Automation characteristics

• Respond to alarms or events• Periodic jobs • Auditing and Notification• Extend AWS functionality• Highly Available and scalable


AWS Lambda: Resize Images

Users upload photos

S3:Source Bucket

S3:Destination Bucket

Triggered on PUTs

Automation: image thumbnail creation from S3

https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing


#3: IoT


IoT – Click to Website

MQTT

AWS

IoT

Static S3

Site

Read

SMS

Amazon

CloudFront

Read/

Write


MQTT

AWS

IoT

Static S3

Site

Read

SMS

Amazon

CloudFront

Read/

Write



http://bit.ly/OneClickIoT


A few Lambda specific best practices

Lambda is stateless à architect accordingly!• Assume no affinity with underlying compute infrastructure• Local filesystem and child processes may not extend beyond

the lifetime of the Lambda request


Lambda considerations and best practices

• Can your Lambda functions survive the cold?

• Instantiate AWS clients and database clients outside the scope of the handler to take advantage of connection re-use.

• Schedule with CloudWatch Events for warmth

• ENIs for VPC support are attached during cold start

import sys

import logging

import rds_config

import pymysql

rds_host = "rds-instance"

db_name =

rds_config.db_name

try:

conn = pymysql.connect(

except:

logger.error("ERROR:

def handler(event, context):

with conn.cursor() as cur:

Executes during

cold start

Executes with

each invocation


Lambda considerations and best practices

How about a file system?• Don’t forget about /tmp

(512 MB of scratch space)exports.ffmpeg = function(event,context)

{

new ffmpeg('./thumb.MP4', function (err,

video)

{

if (!err) {

video.fnExtractFrameToJPG('/tmp’)

function (error, files) { … }

…if (!error)

console.log(files);

context.done();

...


Other resources

• AWS documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html

• Tons of compute blog posts: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/category/aws-lambda/

• Lambda reference architecture: https://github.com/awslabs/lambda-refarch-webapp

• Hello Retail:https://github.com/Nordstrom/hello-retail

• Serverless beyond Functions – Serverless using IoT:https://medium.com/cloud-academy-inc/serverless-beyond-functions-cd81ee4c6b8d


Thanks!Boaz Ziniman, Technical Evangelist, AWS

@ziniman

introduction to serverless computing and aws lambda - aws il meetup

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