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Mike Mackay, Toby Knight, Bastien Leblanc, Imran Dawood, Mike Morain, Andrew Kane, Samuel Waymouth, Lee Packham, all from Amazon and Charles Wilkinson Architecture Head from River Island

This was a retail focused workshop which although not in my normal sphere of interest piqued my interest as its a great example of designing technology for massive, seasonal scale. There’s a difference between designing a system for continuous scale and one for rapid change scale. Black Friday has just happened so the reasons are fresh in our minds. Cost is obviously a factor, you don’t want to be paying for your peak system needs when they’re not being used.

Part of the consideration is being able to satisfy all transactions going through the system when its sale time. Parts of the system are being flooded with sale related requests, yet the non impacted parts of the system must not be squeezed. You can’t let the rest of your IT fall over because just ‘re doing a sale

The workshop used AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, and Amazon API Gateway with existing non-microservices backend systems to divert traffic from the core critical infrastructure using Amazon CloudFront and AWS Lambda@Edge.

You can also play along at home with the instructions https://docs.lee.fishing

Set up

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I arrived in Las Vegas from London via LAX yesterday, so a long time sitting in a plane. Thanksgiving weekend is actually a good weekend to travel as its quieter than normal. I caught up with none other than This Week in AWS host, Corey Quinn. I then stretched the legs and saw a show to stay up and adjust the body clock.

I slept reasonably well for being 8 hours out of sync, did a run to resync and clear the head then more than cancelled out any good will with a breakfast buffet, Vegas style! Lovely!

Registration

Registration was pretty simple, it was different from last year as its only at The Venetian and Aria hotels so you couldn’t register at a smaller venue. You can however register at the airport on arrivals at baggage reclaim which is a nice addition, if you’re arriving from today. Lot of people expected obviously and it looks like so far the Amazon People Queuing System (PQS) is working at scale. Registration allowed you to get a hoodie which is actually pretty comfortable and doesn’t scream “IT clothing” too much!

Managed to also bump into Eric Wright, Gregg Robertson and Chris Porter so re:Invent is also starting with a good community social vibe!

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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.

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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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Another session on managing serverless and the new architectural patterns required to make it a success. The idea of to create reusable serverless patterns with an continual eye on reducing costs.

The venue was spectacular, in the Venetian Theatre which is magnificent. Shows the importance AWS is placing on serverless where most of the other sessions are in smaller rooms at the Aria.

Drew and Maitreya went through a number of patterns, giving operational and security best practices.

This was a fly by the seat of your pants session, so many AWS services were talked about, you needed an AWS dictionary to know what some are. If you are an infrastructure person who manages an OS, this was a very busy but insightful look at what is possible.

Serverless Foundations

For running your apps you can do it yourself with EC2 and even Docker, have managed services like EMR, ES, RDS etc. and then there’s services with no OS which is how they’re defining serverless, so that’s things like API Gateway, Kinesis Streams & Analytics, DynamoDB, S3, Step Functions, Config, X-Ray and Athena.

They reiterated the “never paying for idle” line and its all built for HA and DR.

You need to be aware of cold start, instantiate AWS client and database client outside the scope of the handler to take advantage of container re-use. Schedule with CloudWatch Events for pre-warming. ENUs for VPC support are attached during cold start

Lambda Best Practices

• Minimise package size to necessities
• Separate Lambda handler from core logic,
• Use environment variables to modify operational behaviours.
• Self-contain dependencies in your function package.
• Leverage “Max Memory Used” to right size your functions.
• Delete large unused functions
• Use X-Ray integration for great insights.

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Steven Challis & Derek Felska from AWS were the workshop leaders and it was very hands on, basically up to you and anyone else you wanted to team up with.

This is one of the reasons to actually attend a conference, you get to do things in person and interact with other people rather than watching a recorded session or just follow a step by step plan when you can’t confer.

Intro

Availability and fast performance is key to user experience. Building a global application from the start is traditionally extremely difficult. Think before serverless how you would have to manage a global fleet of EC2 instances, load balancers, databases and storage. You would need to be a DNS guru and keeping your compute generic yet regionalised was super tough. Enter serverless and the promise was there but Lambda needed a whole lot of hacking to get functions to fire based on geographical access.

In the workshop we set up a fictional company called www.wildrydes.com (would you use a ride sharing company called this!). This wasn’t just a normal rider sharing company though, the drivers were unicorns! They needed a customer support application which customers can use to report any issues, be it lost property or a grumpy unicorn! As the service was global and needed to be built, serverless was touted as the ideal platform to use as much as possible (of course, it’s re:Invent!). We needed to lash together Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Route 53, CloudFront and S3 for better availability. Cognito Federated Identities was also used for user authentication.

The workshop was also to highlight the new “API Gateway regional endpoints” feature which was recently released.

There’s no reason to feel left out though, you can go through it all at: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-workshops/

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I was happy to be asked to present at the National UK VMUG about Serverless. I had done the closing keynote last year so pretty relieved that I was at least invited back!

The presentation was similar to the London VMUG presentation I had done in July although updated as the Serverless ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed.

Changes of note since July are the addition of the new and momentum gathering OpenFaas framework, Azure Functions now available in the wild with Azure Stack, AWS adding more Lambda functionality particularly with its announcement that traffic shifting is coming soon for canary releases and blue/green routing. Iron.io bought by Oracle and VMware shutting down Photon Platform and shifting direction to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).

AWS Re:Invent is in less that 2 week’s time so I’m sure there will be plenty more to talk about!

Here are the slides:

Presentation Summary:

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and the new and exciting OpenFaaS. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so critical to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Pivotal Container Service the new Kubernetes based container runtime from VMware as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

I was thrilled to be asked recently to join the CloudInsiders podcast to talk about Serverless. I was joined by Chan Ekanayake and we had a wide ranging discussion on what Serverless is, use cases, pros and cons and much more. It’s worth a listen if you’re trying to get your head around what its all about.

Thanks for having me.

Listen to the episode here: Serverless: Viva la revolución

The whole CloudInsiders podcast series is certainly worth subscribing to via iTunes or Stitcher.

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Platform9 is a regular Tech Field Day presenter and I am lucky to be able to heard from them directly when I attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 in 2015 when it was just starting

The company was founded in 2013 by some clever VMware people who wanted to create a company to provide managed cloud infrastructure with two important distinctions. They wanted their offerings to be SaaS managed and wanted it to use open source software.

It’s first product was a cloud managed OpenStack. OpenStack was (is?) hellishly complicated to set up and manage yourself so Platform9 stepped in and offered a cloud managed OpenStack which would run on-premises. Platform9 would take all the hassle away of deploying and upgrading OpenStack and you could spend your time using your OpenStack private cloud rather than managing it.

As the cloud landscape evolved and containers became the next big thing, Platform9 added a managed Kubernetes option. Kubernetes is also difficult to set up so Platform9 came to the rescue. Clouds don’t stand still and Platform9 now has an alpha version of its own Serverless offering called Fission (plenty to say about this).

Platform9 is a cloud infrastructure management company following the current cloud trajectory in what seems like an ideal evolving portfolio: Managed servers, then managed containers then managed Serverless.

The company has had a recent fund injection of $22m with a mix of existing a new investors to bring the total capital raised to date to £36.5m, a helpful war chest. It currently manages 200 enterprise clouds worldwide.

Hybrid Cloud

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I was super happy to be able to present again at the London VMUG today on some tech that’s going to make a huge impact, Serverless. Yes, its a dumb name, as dumb as cloud but basically refers to Functions as a Service. I went through what it is, covering the important points of event driven user defined functions spun up and down on demand. There’s no infrastructure to manage from the point of the developer, the provider does all the provisioning and scaling.

Here are the slides:

and continuing the summary of what I spoke about…

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and Funcatron. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so crticial to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Photon Kubernetes as a Service as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

JeffConf is also very soon so mentioned the London conference.

Thanks for having me London VMUG.