The future will be

SERVERLESS

Verona, 9 May 2018

Luciano Mammino (@loige)

loige.link/serverless-jsday

loige.link/serverless-jsday​

Luciano... who

Find me online:

- Twitter (@loige)

- GitHub (lmammino)

- Linkedin

- Blog (loige.co)

Solution Architect at

with @mariocasciaro

with @andreaman87

with @ Podgeypoos79

Agenda

Chapter 1: from bare metal to Serverless

Chapter 2: Serverless, WTF?!

Chapter 3: Understanding Serverless

Chapter 4: A Serverless use case

Chapter 5: PROs n' CONs

Chapter 6: It's time to get started

Chapter 1

from bare metal  to Serverless

loige.co/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

1997 — Grid computing: 2 machines are better than 1!

Ian Foster

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, "linux 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)

No server management
You don't know how many and how they are configured

Flexible scaling

If you need more resources, they will be allocated for you

High availability
Redundancy and fault tolerance are built in

Never pay for idle
Unused resources cost $0

The serverless layers

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

👉 Compute

👉 Data

👉 Messaging and Streaming

👉 User Management and Identity

👉 Monitoring and Deployment

👉 Edge

Stuff that we can build

📱  Mobile Backends

🔌  APIs & Microservices

📦  Data Processing pipelines

⚡️  Webhooks

🤖  Bots and integrations

⚙️  IoT Backends

💻  Single page web applications

Some SERVERLESS APPs I helped build

Open source

 

Enterprise

  • Various solutions for the UK Energy industry: Trading platform, Billing engine, Market data aggregator (Planet 9 Energy)
  • Big data pipeline (~1-5TB/day/customer) to make network data searchable (Vectra.ai)

execution model

Event → 𝑓

IF   ________________________________ 

THEN ________________________________

"IF this THEN that" model

A new CSV file is saved to the object storage

Process it and save its records into the DB

HTTP request: GET /products

Retrieve products from DB and return a JSON

It's 2 AM

Scrape weather forecast for next days

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

Search for threats using network metadata
Security researcher
Have an API to be able to search across network metadata files available on the shared FTP drive
I can find and validate potential security threats on the network

A serverless implementation (on AWS)

Network
Metadata

FTP Storage

Search API
(API Gateway)

Network metadata search service

User or other services

Sync
Lambda

Parse/Load
Lambda

API
Lambda

Network Metadata S3 Bucket

/metadata
elastic search index

scheduled event
new object
API
Request

sync lambda

{
  "account": "123456789012",
  "region": "us-east-1",
  "detail": {},
  "detail-type": "Scheduled Event",
  "source": "aws.events",
  "time": "2018-05-09T14:30:21Z",
  "id": "cdc73f9d-aea9-1234-9d5a-835b769c0d9c",
  "resources": [
    "arn:aws:events:us-east-1:123456789012:rule/my-schedule"
  ]
}

Cloudwatch scheduled event

exports.syncLambda = (
  event,
  context,
  callback
) => {
  // 1. connect to the FTP server
  // 2. get list of files from FTP
  // 3. get list of files from S3
  // 4. make a diff to find new files in FTP
  // 5. read the new files and save them to S3
  // 6. invoke the callback to stop lambda
}

sync lambda

LOAD lambda

{
  "Records": [
    {
      "eventTime": "2018-05-09T14:30:21Z",
      "s3": {
        "object": {
          "eTag": "0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef",
          "sequencer": "0A1B2C3D4E5F678901",
          "key": "2018-05-09-metadata.csv.gz",
          "size": 1024
        },
        "bucket": {
          "arn": "arn:aws:s3:::metadata-sync-files",
          "name": "metadata-sync-files",
        }
      },
      "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
      "eventName": "ObjectCreated:Put",
      "eventSource": "aws:s3"
    }
  ]
}

S3 new object event

new object
exports.loadLambda = (
  event,
  context,
  callback
) => {
  // 1. get the new file details from the `event`
  // 2. read the file and deserialize the records
  // 3. send the records to elastic search using 
  //    the bulk API
  // 4. invoke the callback to stop lambda
}

LOAD lambda

API lambda

{
  "body": "",
  "resource": "/metadata/search",
  "requestContext": {
    "resourceId": "123456",
    "apiId": "1234567890",
    "resourcePath": "/metadata/search",
    "httpMethod": "GET",
    "requestId": "c6af9ac6-7b61-11e6-9a41-93e8deadbeef",
    "stage": "prod"
  },
  "queryStringParameters": {
    "q": "srcIp:127.0.0.1 AND host:google.com"
  },
  "headers": {
    "User-Agent": "Custom User Agent String",
  },
  "httpMethod": "GET",
  "path": "/metadata/search"
}

API Gateway proxy event

API
Request

exports.apiLambda = (
  event,
  context,
  callback
) => {
  // 1. read the HTTP details (query) from 
  //    the `event`
  // 2. issue the query to ElasticSearch to the
  //    given index
  // 3. reformat the results into an API gateway
  //    response
  // 4. invoke the callback passing the response
}

API lambda

Orchestration / configuration

Who defines the events and where do we store the config?

ORCHESTRATION / CONFIGURATION

Many options

service: metadataSearch

provider:
  name: aws
  runtime: nodejs8.10

functions:
  sync:
    handler: index.syncLambda
    environment:
      FTP_HOST: "28.0.1.22:23"
      FTP_USERNAME: admin
      FTP_PASSWORD: unicorns
      S3_BUCKET: metadata-sync-files
    events:
      - schedule: rate(2 hours)

  load:
    handler: index.loadLambda
    environment:
      ES_INDEX: metadata
    events:
      - s3:
          bucket: metadata-sync-files
          event: "s3:ObjectCreated:*"

  api:
    handler: index.apiLambda
    environment:
      ES_INDEX: metadata
    events:
      - http: GET metadata/search

Serverless framework example

serverless.yml
sls deploy
  • Reads the serverless.yml and parses the resources
  • Creates a zip file containing the source code
  • Creates a Cloudformation stack with all the resources listed in serverless.yml
  • Deploys the stack (including Lambda code)
$

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

  • What type of virtual machine do I need?

  • What operating 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 A FaaS 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

Open FaaS

Why IS Serverless the future?

My 2 favourite reasons:

Opportunity to deliver value to the customer quickly

Pay only for the used resources

Tomorrow I'll migrate all my apps to serverless

Approach this with care...

Thanks!

Questions?

Now or later to @loige :)

loige.link/serverless-jsday

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

Credits

High Res Emojis by emojiisland.com

a HUGE thanks to:

@vladholubiev

@mariocasciaro

@katavic_d

@Podgeypoos79

PLEASE GIVE FEEDBACK

loige.link/vote-jsday

The future will be Serverless - JSDay Verona 2018

By Luciano Mammino

The future will be Serverless - JSDay Verona 2018

Software development is on the verge of a new revolution that will change the rules of the Cloud Computing game... again! The new wind of change is called "Serverless" and you should definitely get ready for it! In this talk I will illustrate why I believe Serverless will be a game changer in the industry, how did we get to have Serverless and how to get started with it to build real products.

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