How serverless helps startups innovate and scale

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Aﬃliates. All rights reserved.
Gabe Hollombe
Developer &Technical Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
@gabehollombe
How Serverless Helps Startups
Innovate and Scale
5 April, 2018

Gabe Hollombe
Software Developer & Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
15+ years writing all sorts of software
EdTech ⇢ Agile/XP Consulting ⇢ Nano-satellites ⇢ AWS
Web / Ruby / Python / Node / C# / Clojure
Bad puns, old whiskey, clean code
@gabehollombe

AWS Customers in Southeast Asia

“Software is eating the world.”
Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz

“Any new business should consider
going 100% cloud from the start.”
Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz

Why?

Because you can test your idea,
very quickly, for little money.
Then, if you are on to something,
you can scale, rapidly.

“Cloud computing and the open
source movements have brought
down the costs of starting a
company by more than 90%.”
Mark Suster, Upfront Ventures

“[With AWS] … we can actually focus on
building stuﬀ and getting it out to the
customer as fast as possible.”
Ash Crick, CTO
30 Developers 7 Months 1,000,000 customers

How?
Run less software.

Rich Archbold,
Senior Director of Engineering
We can take steps to help us see, understand, decide and execute more
quickly and eﬀectively than our competitors. This is the essence of what
the philosophy of Run Less Software is all about.
[…]
Function (also known as Serverless) is about to be the next big thing. AI is
potentially the next elephant waiting to enter the room. There are more
opportunities than ever to outsource your undiﬀerentiated heavy lifting to
third parties.
https://blog.intercom.com/run-less-software/

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Aﬃliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Aﬃliates. All rights reserved.
What is Serverless?

It Started with AWS Lambda
Serverless Computing

Events
Services (anything)
Lambda functions
Event driven

Event-driven platform
S3 event
notifications
DynamoDB
Streams
Kinesis
events
Cognito
events
SNS
events
Custom
events
CloudTrail
events
LambdaDynamoDB
Kinesis S3
Any custom
Invoked in response to events
Changes in data-
Changes in state-
Redshift
SNS
Access any service,
including your own
Such as…
CloudWatch
events
Lambda functions

Function – ﬁrst class citizen
def handler(event, context):
return {
"message": ”Hello World!",
"event": event
}
Focus on solving business problems•
Reusable components•
Easier to isolate failure•

Anatomy of a Lambda function
Handler() function
Function to be executed
upon invocation
Event object
Data sent during
Lambda Function
Invocation
Context object
Methods available to
interact with runtime
information (request ID,
log group, etc.)
def handler(event, context):
return {
"message": ”Hello World!",
"event": event
}

Lambda execution model
Synchronous (push) Asynchronous (event) Stream-based
Amazon
API Gateway
AWS Lambda
function
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
SNS
/api/hello
AWS Lambda
function
Amazon
S3
reqs
Amazon
Kinesis
changes
AWS Lambda
service
function

You can achieve massive scales with Lambda
processes 4,000 requests
per second
processes half a trillion
validations of stock
trades daily
reduced the time to
ingest and process data
for its analytics pipeline
by 97%
can handle spikes
of 80x normal traffic
triggers 1.2 billion
Lambda requests
each month

Serverless is more than just functions.

Serverless
Scalability without server management.

Run less software.

Why Serverless?
No servers to manage

Why Serverless?
Availability and Fault Tolerance Built In

AZ1 AZ2 AZ3
Serverless Services

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Aﬃliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Why Serverless?
Scale with usage

Serverless distributed computing: PyWren
PyWren prototype developed at University of California, Berkeley
Uses Python with AWS Lambda stateless functions for large-scale data
analytics
Achieved @ 30-40 MB/s write and read performance per core to Amazon S3
object store
Scaled to 60-80 GB/s across 2,800 simultaneous functions

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Aﬃliates. All rights reserved.
Why Serverless?
Pay-per request

Buy compute time in•
100 ms increments
No hourly, daily, or•
monthly minimums
No per• -device fees
Free Tier
1 million requests and 400,000 GBs of compute
every month, every customer

Bustle.com
Bustle.com is a news, entertainment, lifestyle, and
fashion website:
52 million monthly users•
100 million events daily•
84% cost savings•
0 servers•
0 operating system patches•
Automatic scaling•
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/bustle/

Why Lambda?
>95% decrease in overall deployment and operational costs
Scales up or down for variation in customer request volume
Migrating tasks to Lambda took only a few weeks
95% Reduction in Computation Cost
AWS Lambda enables the FICO Decision Management Suite (DMS)
to perform computations on machine learning models quickly, cheaply,
and efficiently
AWS Lambda

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Aﬃliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Let’s talk about Serverless for…
• Apps & Services
• Data Streams & Analytics
• Development & Deployment

Serverless for…
• Apps & Services

Why are we always smiling in selﬁes?

We made the front page!
Can we handle the load?

AWSome
Selfie Challenge

The Results…

AWSome Selﬁe Challenge Architecture
Servers

How serverless helps startups innovate and scale

Use by emergency authorities

Flood scene recognition
Twitter: @lentisha

Elastic Beanstalk
cognicity-schema
Bot reply
cognicity-server
API Gateway
Users Mobile Client
Facebook
(PostgreSQL)
Static web content (AWS
CloudFront CDN)
cognicity-notiﬁcation-service
Facebook
SNS
PetaBencana
Architecture

Build PCI- and HIPAA-compliant serverless applications!
Serverless platform services that can be used in both:
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
S3
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Kinesis
Streams
Amazon
Cognito
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SNS

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless for…
Apps & Services
• Data Streams & Analytics

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to work with real-
time streaming data
Amazon Kinesis
Streams
For Technical Developers•
Collect and stream data•
for ordered, replay-able,
real-time processing
Amazon Kinesis
Firehose
• For all developers, data
scientists
• Easily load massive
volumes of streaming data
into Amazon S3, Redshift,
ElasticSearch
Amazon Kinesis
Analytics
For all developers, data•
scientists
Easily analyze data•
streams using standard
SQL queries

“Amazon Kinesis does a lot of the
heavy lifting, and lets Supercell
focus on delivering games that
delight players worldwide.”
Sami Yliharju
Services Lead, Supercell Games
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/supercell/

Real-time analytics for mobile web app
Amazon
Kinesis
Stream
Amazon
Kinesis
Analytics
Amazon
Cognito
Amazon
Kinesis
Stream
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Lambda
Amazon S3
JavaScript SDK

Serverless for…
Apps & Services
Data Streams & Analytics
• Development & Deployment

Typical development steps
Integration testing•
Load testing•
UI• tests
Security testing•
Commit•
Code review•
• Compile code
• Unit tests
• Style / linting
• Container image
Deploy• to
production
environment
Source Build Test Production

DevOps – What is it?
Faster development → More experimentation & innovation → Customer happiness
developers customers
releasetestbuild
plan monitor
Distribution pipeline
Feedback mechanism
Automation for agile software development cycles

OK! Sounds good. What do I use?

AWS CodeStar

Serverless for…
Apps & Services
Data Streams & Analytics
Development & Deployment

No servers to provision
or manage
Scales with usage
Never pay for idle Availability and fault
tolerance built in
Serverless means…

AWS
Lambda
Amazon
S3
Amazon
DynamoDB
AWS
CodeDeploy
AWS
CodePipeline
AWS
CodeStar
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
Athena
Amazon
Lex
Amazon
Polly
Amazon
Rekognition
Amazon
Pinpoint
Amazon
Cognito
AWS Step
Functions
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
SNS
Amazon
SES
Amazon
Aurora
Serverless
Functions
DevOps
Queues & Notiﬁcations
Storage
Identity & App Analytics
AI Application Services Streams & Data Analytics
All of this is
“serverless.”

Further Reading
AWS Serverless Computing & Applications
https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/serverless-architectures-with-aws-lambda.pdf
Serverless Applications Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Serverless-Applications-Lens.pdf
Streaming Data Solutions on AWS with Amazon Kinesis
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/whitepaper-streaming-data-solutions-on-aws-with-amazon-kinesis.pdf
AWS Serverless Multi-Tier Architectures
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Serverless_Multi-Tier_Archiectures.pdf

Run less.
Deliver more.
Build on!

Thank you!
@gabehollombe
Gabe Hollombe
Technical Evangelist, AWS

How serverless helps startups innovate and scale

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