Serverless

April 2018

Global Azure Bootcamp

About Me

• David Fekke
• Chief Mobile Architect for Swyft Technology
• Why is a Mobile developer giving an Azure presentation?
• 20+ Years building Web Applications
• .NET, Java, PHP, ColdFusion and Node.js
• Commercial Pilot and Remote Pilot
• Co-Organize JaxNode User Group
• www.jaxnode.com

Servers

Australia Census Example 

• Australia decided to go paperless in 2016
• Load tested with millions of requests
• 1000s of Aussies went to do their census online
• Site was DDoS attacked
• Down 40 hours
• Census missed the deadline

Hosting Applications

• Run locally
• Deploy to Server (in a data center hopefully)
• On Premise
• Co-Location in rack space
• Cloud Hosting (Rackspace, CenturyLink)
• PAAS (AWS EC2, Azure, Bluemix)
• Container hosting
• Serverless (Lambda, Azure Functions)

Micro-Service apps

• Composed of many services
• Sometimes called micro-services
• May have less than 200 lines of code
• One function per service
• Logging important!!!

Randrr's Cloud solution

• AWS EC2
• Deploying Docker and Kubernetes
• Using Kafka and Cassandra for DBs
• Microservices written in GO and Node.js
• Node service was running in 50 MBs
• Rewrote into GO, now 1 MB
• No vendor lockin

Docker Issues

• Still need to deploy VMs
• VMs can be elastically deployed, but still need have some running all the time
• Services running in Python or JavaScript become expensive
• Services written in Java can have long warmup times

Lambda or Function apps

• Don't need to manage infrastructure
• Services can be written as simple functions
• Deployed through Portal UI or through command line tools like the azure-cli
• Available on Azure, AWS, IBM OpenWhisk and now Firebase functions

AWS Lambda

• Written in JS, Java, Python, C# or Go
• Bound to events or HTTP requests
• 128 MB RAM Default per function
• Monitor logging with CloudWatch

Azure Functions

• Azure version of AWS Lambda
• Similar model
• NPM install modules through console
• Use with Azure Logic Apps

Advantages of Serverless

• Lowest Cost hosting
• Simple development model
• Simple deployment
• Don't have to worry about load scheduling
• Scales automagically

$0.20 per 1 million requests

Disadvantage of Serverless

• Local development a challenge
• No NPM Support (Azure has NPM)
• Debugging threw logging

Executing Functions

• Triggered off of events
• HTTP endpoints
• Schedule (cron)
• fired on file uploads or queues

Ocean Disc example

• Mobile app had to store reports
• Upload to S3 storage
• Process files based on upload event
• Call REST based service
• Accomplished threw AWS Lambda

We are going to need a bigger framework!

Serverless Framework

• Formerly Called Jaws
• Formerly AWS only
• Build entire apps from Lambda/Functions
• Organize functions
• Local development and testing
• resource management (APIs and Databases)
• Multi-region development
• Now on IBM OpenWhisk

Event Gateway

• API Gateway
• Cross cloud events
• Platform agnostic
• Extend through middleware

method signature

module.exports.hello = (context, data) => {
  const response = {
      message: 'Hello World!',
      input: data.paramName,
  };

  context.done(response);
};

module.exports.hello = (event, context, callback) => {
  const response = {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify({
      message: 'Hello World!',
      input: event,
    }),
  };

  callback(null, response);
};

AWS Lambda method

Azure Environment Vars

# export Azure serverless keys
export azureSubId='########-####-####-####-46ac114fbfc4'
export azureServicePrincipalTenantId='########-####-####-####-bedeee9b4cf3'
export azureServicePrincipalClientId='http://azure-cli-2018-04-21-17-33-32'
export azureServicePrincipalPassword='########-####-####-####-79f2e198745f'

Install Serverless

• Install Node.js
• $ npm i -g serverless
• Verify
• $ sls -v

Serverless CLI

• $ sls create -t azure-nodejs --path <path-to-app>
• $ sls deploy
• $ sls deploy --function functionName
• $ sls invoke --function functionName
• $ sls logs -f hello

Demo

Questions?

Resources

• slides.com/davidfekke/serverless-41
• github.com/jaxnode-UG/serverless-crud