The future will be

SERVERLESS

Munich, 9 Dec 2017

Luciano Mammino (@loige)

loige.link/serverless-future

loige.link/serverless-future

Luciano... who?

Let's connect

Twitter (@loige)

GitHub (lmammino)

Linkedin

https://loige.co

... just a Fullstack developer

Agenda

Chapter 1

from bare metal  to Serverless

“You have to know the past to understand the present.”

― Carl Sagan

1989-1991 — Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web

1991-1995 — The bare metal age

1995 — The invention of web hosting

1999 — Salesforce introduces the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS)

Marc Benioff

2001 — VMWare releases ESXi, "server virtualization" becomes a thing

2002-2006 — AWS is born (IaaS), people talk about "Cloud computing"

2009 — Heroku and the invention of the "Platform as a Service" (PaaS)

 James Lindenbaum

Adam Wiggins

Orion Henry

2011 — Envolve/Firebase, real time database as a service (RTDaaS???)

James Tamplin and Andrew Lee

2012 — Parse.com and the first Backend as a Service (BaaS)

Tikhon Bernstam
Ilya Sukhar
James Yu
Kevin Lacker

2013 — Docker, "containers are better than virtual machines"

Solomon Hykes

2013-2015 — Kubernetes / Swarm / Nomad / CoreOs (containers at scale)

2014 — Launch of AWS Lambda (FaaS)

Chapter 2

Serverless, WTF*?!

*What's The Fun

"Serverless most often refers to serverless applications. Serverless applications are ones that don't require you to provision or manage any servers. You can focus on your core product and business logic instead of responsibilities like operating system (OS) access control, OS patching, provisioning, right-sizing, scaling, and availability. By building your application on a serverless platform, the platform manages these responsibilities for you."

— Amazon Web Services
loige.link/serverless-apps-lambda

 

The essence of the serverless trend is the absence of the server concept during software development.

 

— Auth0

loige.link/what-is-serverless

loige.link/serverless-commitstrip

Chapter 3

Understanding Serverless

loige.link/serverless-abstraction

The 4 pillars of serverless

(TLDR; It's not only about servers)

The serverless layers

(TLDR; It's not only "FaaS")

Stuff that we can build

📱  Mobile Backends

🔌  APIs & Microservices

📦  Data Processing pipelines

⚡️  Webhooks

🤖  Bots and integrations

⚙️  IoT Backends

💻  Single page web applications

execution model

Event → 𝑓

IF   ________________________________ 

THEN ________________________________
        

"IF this THEN that" model

Serverless and JavaScript

Frontend

🌏 Serverless Web hosting is static, but you can build SPAs
(React, Angular, Vue, etc.)

Backend

👌 Node.js is supported by every provider

⚡️ Fast startup (as opposed to Java)

📦 Use all the modules on NPM

🤓 Support other languages/dialects
(TypeScript, ClojureScript, ESNext...)

exports.myLambda = function (
    event,
    context,
    callback
) {

  // get input from event and context

  // use callback to return output or errors

}

Anatomy of a Node.js lambda on AWS

Chapter 4

A serverless use case

In order to consume DuoS data for invoicing

      As an engineer

  I Want to have a process that keeps data from
            the source FTP in sync

        And exposes it as a REST API

A serverless implementation (on AWS)

DuoS Data

3rd-party

FTP Storage

(Many) things I didn't have to worry about...

• What kind of virtual machine do I need?

• What operative system?

• How to keep OS/System updated?

• How much disk space do I need?

• How do I handle/retry failures?

• How do I collect and rotate logs?

• What about metrics?

• What machine do I need to run the database?

• How do I backup the database?

• How do I scale the database?

• Which web server should I use and how to configure it?

• Throttling? Managing API Keys? API caching?

Chapter 5

PROs n' CONs​

Focus on delivering business value / Fast time to market

Less "Tech-freedom™️" /

Tight vendor lock-in!

Optimal resource allocation

Not-magic™!

You still have to write configuration

Auto-scalability

Cold start problem

loige.link/cold-start

High Availability

Soft/Hard Limits

loige.link/lambda-limits​

Pay per usage

(don't pay for idle!)

Local development,
Testing, Debugging

Growing ecosystem

Older technologies
might not integrate well

Chapter 6

It's time to get started​

Who is already adopting Serverless

Pick one and start to have fun!

IBM

Cloud Functions

AWS

Lambda

Azure

Functions

Google

Cloud Functions

Auth0

Webtask

Iron.io
FaaS

Spotinst

Functions

Apache OpenWhisk

Fission

stdlib

service

Functions

Fn

Kubeless

Cloud based

Self-hosted / Open Source

F

effe

LeverOS

Why is this the right direction for the future?

Should I migrate all my apps to serverless?

Approach this with care...

Thanks!

Questions?

Now or later to @loige :)

loige.link/serverless-future

If your company wants to get started with serverless on AWS, be sure to check out serverlesslab.com

Credits

Cover photo by Tobias Zils on Unsplash
High Res Emojis by emojiisland.com

• webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting_service​
• loige.link/web-hosting-history
• computerweekly.com/feature/A-history-of-cloud-computing
• salesforceben.com/brief-history-salesforce-com
• aws.amazon.com/about-aws
• fullstackpython.com/serverless.html
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform)
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebase
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_Linux_by_CoreOS
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS_Lambda
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
• loige.link/aws-serverless-lens
• loige.link/serverless-apps-lambda
• start.jcolemorrison.com/aws-lambda-vs-the-world
• m.subbu.org/serverless-looking-back-to-see-forward-74dd1a02cb62
• github.com/anaibol/awesome-serverless

a HUGE thanks to:

@acambas_sasa

@katavic_d

@Podgeypoos79

@lakatos88