Presentation given to NashJS (http://meetup.com/nashjs) on 6/14/2018 about serverless architecture in AWS using the Serverless framework (http://serverless.com).

1. Serverless
daniel.cottone@asurion.com
Github: daniel-cottone
Daniel Cottone @ Asurion

2. What we’ll talk about...
● Evolution of the cloud
● What is serverless?
● Let’s make a service!
● Lessons learned

3. Evolution of the cloud

4. Evolution of the
cloud
● Physical servers
● Long/expensive
provisioning
● Lots of operational
challenges/expenses
● Mostly idle
Pre-Virtualization

5. Evolution of the
cloud
● Fewer physical servers
● Greatly reduced provisioning
time and cost
● Still mostly idle
● Capacity planning still painful
● Fewer operational
challenges/expenses
Virtualization / Private Cloud

6. Evolution of the
cloud
● No physical servers
● Minimal provisioning time
● Still mostly idle
● Capacity planning no
longer painful
● Some operational costs
Cloud Initial Adoption (IaaS)

7. Evolution of the
cloud
● Minimal provisioning time
● Scale to meet demand
● No capacity planning
● Limited operational costs
Auto-scaling and High Availability

8. Evolution of the
cloud
● No provisioning, just
configuration
● Scaling is abstracted
● Highly available by
default
● Minimal operational costs
Embracing PaaS

9. What is serverless?

10. “Serverless is when you pretend that using someone
else’s servers means they don’t exist.”
- Someone on the internet

11. Serverless is an abstraction from everything except code
and configuration.

12. What is serverless?
● Abstraction from
infrastructure; just code and
configuration
● Scaling handled automatically
● Event-driven design

13. Serverless Frameworks and Providers

14. Serverless Frameworks and Providers

15. Serverless
Framework
● Designed for rapid
development
● Event-driven
● Provider agnostic
● Extensible via plugins
● Integrates well with CI/CD

16. Serverless
Framework
● Configuration specified in
YAML
● Deployment of services via
command line

17. API Gateway
● Service to publish and define
REST APIs
● Acts as the HTTP “front door”
● Integrates with compute
resources
○ Lambda
○ AWS Services
○ HTTP endpoint

18. Lambda
● Function (code) that runs
when triggered by an event
● Key components
○ Event
○ Context
○ Callback

19. Cloud Formation
● Tool for provisioning
infrastructure in AWS
● Codify infrastructure in
templates,
“infrastructure as code”

20. Let’s make a service!

21. Getting set up
Install serverless Create a service
yarn global add serverless
npm install -g serverless
sls create --template aws-nodejs --path
test-service --name test-service

22. Check out the demo
Checkout the repo
git clone https://github.com/daniel-cottone/serverless-demo.git

23. Lessons learned...

24. Lessons learned
Reduced Visibility:
● Tooling exists, but not
cohesive
● Complex, decentralized
infrastructure
● Can be difficult to debug

25. Lessons learned
Latency:
● Overall latency is great
● Peak latency can be bad
● Cold-starts and
occasional latency have
to be accepted

26. Lessons learned
Not yet mature:
● Serverless is still
somewhat bleeding edge
● Missing lots of really nice
features
● Stability of
frameworks/tooling not
100% yet (but pretty good)

27. Thanks!
We’re hiring! Check out our team at SolutoNashville.com
daniel.cottone@asurion.com
https://github.com/daniel-cottone/serverless-demo

28. Questions?