Introduction to Serverless

What is Serverless?
• Serverless Book
• Serverless Conference
• Serverless Framework
• Serverless Inc.
• Serverless Architectures
• Serverless Application Model

Mike Roberts
“Serverless architectures refer to applications that signiﬁcantly
depend on third-party services (knows as Backend as a Service or
"BaaS") or on custom code that's run in ephemeral containers
(Function as a Service or "FaaS"), the best known vendor host of
which currently is AWS Lambda. By using these …”
https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

Function as a unit of application logic

How does it work?
• New instances based on invocation demand
• Events trigger a function

Check if an instance is running
Yes No
Handle the Request
Stop the Process 
(stop the instance if idle to long)
Start an instanceActivate the Process

Isn’t that limiting?
Yes! 🙃

Beneﬁts
• 📈 Auto scaling
• 💵 Pay per execution
• 🎪 Event Driven
• 🗝 Security

Common Use Cases
• 🕸 Web Applications
• 📱 Mobile & IoT Backends
• 💹 Data Processing
• 🤖 Chatbots

Providers
• AWS Lambda
• Google Cloud Functions
• Microsoft Functions
• IBM Openwhisk
• Auth0 Webtasks
• IronIO IronFunctions
• many more …

Numbers
• Thomson Reuter processes 4000 req/sec
• Finra processes half a trillion validations
of stock trades daily
• Vevo can handle spikes of 80x normal traﬃc

Challenges
• Monitoring
• Cold starts
• Development ﬂow
• Application architecture
• Service Discovery
• Service Communication

Deployment Options
• User Interface
• API calls (Serverless Framework v0, Claudia, Zappa, Apex)
• CloudFormation (Serverless Framework v1, SAM)

Deploy via the API
var params = {
Code: {},
Description: "",
FunctionName: "MyFunction",
Handler: "souce_file.handler_name",
MemorySize: 128,
Publish: true,
Role: "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/service-role/role-name",
Runtime: "nodejs4.3",
Timeout: 15,
VpcConfig: {}
};
lambda.createFunction(params, function(err, data) {
if (err) console.log(err, err.stack);
else console.log(data);
});

Deploy via Serverless Framework
# serverless.yml
service: serverless-simple-http-endpoint
frameworkVersion: ">=1.1.0 <2.0.0"
provider:
name: aws
runtime: nodejs4.3
functions:
currentTime:
handler: handler.endpoint
events:
- http:
path: ping
method: get

// handler.js
module.exports.endpoint = (event, context, callback) => {
const time = new Date().toTimeString();
const response = {
statusCode: 200,
body: JSON.stringify({
message: `Hello, the current time is ${time}.`,
}),
};
callback(null, response);
};

service: scheduled-cron-example
provider:
name: aws
runtime: nodejs4.3
functions:
cron:
handler: handler.run
events:
# Invoke Lambda function every minute
- schedule: rate(1 minute)
secondCron:
handler: handler.run
events:
# Invoke Lambda function every 2nd minute from Mon-Fri
- schedule: cron(0/2 * ? * MON-FRI *)

service: text-analysis-via-sns-post-processing
frameworkVersion: ">=1.1.0 <2.0.0"
provider:
name: aws
runtime: nodejs4.3
functions:
analyzeNote:
handler: analyzeNote.analyzeNote
events:
- sns: analyzeNote

Services
• Database
• FilesStorage
• Queues
• HTTP
• WebSockets
• IoT Management

Fin
 
Thanks for listening! 
https://github.com/nikgraf 
https://twitter.com/nikgraf

Introduction to Serverless

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Introduction to Serverless