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I attended the AWS re:Invent conference a few weeks ago and based on my in-show blogging, ActualTechMedia asked me if I would do a review for them.

ICYMI – AWS re:Invent Recap

I also blogged up a storm while I was there…

Show Preview and Daily Buzz updates:

• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview
• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 0 Buzz
• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 1 Buzz
• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 2 Buzz
• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 3 Buzz
• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 4 Buzz
• AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Review

Blogged Sessions and Workshops I attended:

• Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users – ARC201
• Build a Multi-Region Serverless Application for Resilience and High Availability Workshop
• Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid – FSV301
• What’s New in Serverless – SRV305
• How AWS Runs Our Weekly Operations Meetings – ENT346
• Tuesday Night Live with Peter Desantis
• Become a Serverless Black Belt: Optimizing Your Serverless Applications – SRV401

Breakfast

I headed to the Venetian to watch the keynote remotely. Have to mention the breakfast at the Grand Luxe Cafe which was Churros French Toast!

I certainly wasn’t expecting this, it was excellent!

Werner Vogels Keynote

AWS CTO Werner Vogels wanted to use the keynote not for a slew of announcements but rather to revisit the original AWS keynote with “21st century architecture re:Imagined” and set out what the architecture should be for the next few years.

I’m not going to go through the whole keynote as this is covered elsewhere but some things that I found interesting.

Human Interfaces

He talked about the importance of data and the interfaces to it. They will become more human rather than machine like voice with Alexa. Voice unlocks digital systems for everyone.

Alexa for Business was announced which will allow you to join conference calls easily and know where you are and who you are to automatically join a call. I wonder how this will all work in open plan offices. Werner says we need to start thinking about voice as an interface with a conversation rather than just a webpage output to interact with back end systems.

He then talked about the three different “planes”, Admin, Control and Data. I like the addition of the Admin plan which I haven’t seen before.

• He listed some architecture guidelines
• Stop guessing capacity needs
• Test systems in production
• Automate to make architectural experimentation
• Drive your architecture using data
• Improve through Game Days

Read more…

Tim Wagner the AWS Serverless GM and Jeet Kaul from FICO

This session was about new things in serverless.

Tim reiterated how mazing Lambda is coming, its even inside a camera which was announced in the keynote as well as the top memory size being doubled to 3Gb which also doubled the CPU power.

Magic!

There was a mini magic show which was apparently a nod to something they did last year.

The idea is to show disappearing servers, as there are more and more serverless offerings, this means more and more disappearing servers.

Serverless Application Repository.

It’s worth looking at the recently announces Serverless Application Repository, its a marketplace of serverless functions published by AWS and others.

Read more…

Ajay Nair from AWS and Peter Sbarski from A Cloud Guru

Another session on architectural best practices and a bunch of handy little things to help you out. It was advanced so no overviews required about “what is serverless”.

Multiple Points to Optimise

For normal optimisation with traditional application stacks you actually pack things together but for serverless you do the opposite, as its generally better and more scalable if things are spread out.

There are three components to look at, the interface via API Gateway or Alexa, the compute with Lambda and the data with S3, DynamoDB etc.

The main goal is to try and reduce latency which doesn’t just take time but also costs you more. The more functions you are stringing together the more latency issues will bug you.

The Lean Function

Anatomy of a function = the function + language runtime + functional container + compute substrate

When function invokes it:

1. downloads your code
2. starts new container
3. bootstraps the runtime
4. starts the code.

Everything before start code is cold start. AWS optimises stages 1 and 2 (and have had 80% improvement in latency for some scenarios) and your job is to optimise 3 and 4.

Try to make your logic as concise as possible:

• efficient / single purpose code
• avoid fat / monolithic functions
• control the dependencies in the package
• optimise for your language

You can also see the start times in X-Ray.

For Java avoid using the whole SDK aws-java-sdk directly, rather use the subcomponent aws-java-sdk-s3 or aws-java-sdk-dynamodb.

This reduces your dependency size

Ephemeral Environment

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