Achieving a Serverless Development Experience

ACHIEVING A “SERVERLESS” DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE
CLOUD EXPO NYC, June 8th 2016
Ivan Dwyer - Head of Business Development, Iron.io
ivan@iron.io | @fortyfivan

Iron.io is an enterprise-grade development platform for
building highly scalable event-driven applications
➔ Operating in production since 2011 ➔ Team of 50+ headquartered in San Francisco
➔ 5,000+ active developer accounts ➔ 600+ customers from startups to enterprises
➔ Millions of containers processed per day ➔ Thousands of servers abstracted at any time

Businesses are on the hook to deliver
continuous innovation to their customers
Developers are on the hook to deliver
continuous innovation to the business

➔ Faster time to market
➔ Shorter release cycles
➔ Resilient systems at scale
➔ Optimized for performance
➔ Cost efficient scalability
➔ Minimal operational overhead
➔ No technology lock-in
We demand so much from our teams today yesterday

How can we empower our developers to be
more productive within reasonable bounds?

The ways software is built and shipped has evolved...
Architecture
Infrastructure
Monolith N-Tier Microservices
Servers Virtual Machines Containers

along with how the systems and applications operate and behave...
Operations
Behavior
Manual Configured Automated
Requested Software Defined Event-Driven
{...}

giving rise to the DevOps culture of responsibility and collaboration.
Automation
Speed
Waterfall
Agile
Lean
Continuous
Responsibility
Collaboration

What happens when we bring
all these modern concepts together
where each of their true value lies?

Microservices enable independent workloads

Containers enable a portable runtime

DevOps best practices enable automated workflows

Event-driven computing enables reactive invocation

Independent + Portable + Automated + Reactive = ??

Let’s first dispel a few myths about Serverless
“There’s still servers… they’re just
managed by somebody else”
“A Serverless architecture is
no different than PaaS”
“Serverless is leading us to
the NoOps revolution!”
X
X
X

An application architecture that enables single purpose jobs
to be packaged independently as portable units of compute
that execute through a fully automated pipeline
when a predetermined event occurs.
My attempted definition of “Serverless”
Microservices
Containers
DevOps
Event-driven

When does it make sense to apply these patterns?

Pushed
Long Running
Requested
Load Balanced
Elastic
Uploaded
Ephemeral
Triggered
Queued
Concurrent
12-Factor App Serverless Job
Making a behavioral distinction

Common use cases
Backend Transactions
➔ Processing a credit card
➔ Sending an email
➔ Bots, bots, bots!
Batch Processes
➔ Multiple file processing
➔ Crunching a big data set
➔ Multi-step workflows
Data Pipelines
➔ Processing machine data
➔ Service to service integrations
➔ Custom CI/CD pipelines
Scheduled Jobs
➔ Daily notifications
➔ Web crawling
➔ Database scrubs

Systems Applications Manual
Pub/Sub Stream Schedule
Potential event sources
Be careful: events have a tendency to pile up in real world application scenarios

How does this impact the development process?

BUILD
single purpose functions
UPLOAD
to an image registry
SET
event triggers
CONFIGURE
runtime parameters
INSPECT
processing results
The Serverless development experience with Iron.io
There’s no need for you to provision the resources, configure the systems, or manage the components

stdout/stderr
The Event-Driven workflow of an Iron.io job
Queue Job Execute Container Capture ResultsGet Image
docker pull
{payload.json}
spin up tear down
The entire workflow is fully automated without any human intervention

Developer empowerment comes from effective abstraction further up the stack

Being a platform means knowing where to draw the lines...
Container Orchestration
Raw Resources
Container Services
Container
Management
Workload
Distribution
Intelligent
AutoscalingWorkload Optimization
IronWorker
Job Processing
IronMQ
Message Queue
IronCache
Key/Value Data Store
Core Components
Administrative
Dashboard
Role-Based
Access Controls
Advanced
Reporting
Management Tools
Value Line
Abstraction Line
APIDeveloper Interface

that best enable developers to satisfy the demands of the business.
Developer friendly API + interface
Independent single purpose workloads
Battle tested in production
Lightweight processing footprint
Effective resource allocation
Fully automated delivery pipelines
Cloud native standardization
Faster time to market
Shorter release cycles
Resilient systems at scale
Optimized for performance
Cost efficient scalability
Minimal operational overhead
No technology lock-in
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓

Extra Credit: Tweet to @getiron what you think we should call “serverless”
THANK YOU!
Ivan Dwyer - Head of Business Development, Iron.io
ivan@iron.io | @fortyfivan

Achieving a Serverless Development Experience

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