Serverless

As a developer, I’ve built apps and wrote code. As a cheesecake connoisseur, I’ve tried many different kinds of cheesecake. After I got to talk to some of the bakers, I realized that building apps and baking cheesecake have a lot in common. It all starts with knowing and trusting your ingredients.

According to Tidelift, over 90 percent of applications contain some open source packages. Developers choose open source because they believe it’s better, more flexible, and more extendible. A lot of developers also fear how well packages are maintained and how security vulnerabilities are identified and solved.

At re:Invent, AWS introduced the ability to have EKS run pods on AWS Fargate, and Fargate is cheaper than hosting Kubernetes yourself. In the last post I created an EKS cluster, so let’s add this new capability to the cluster and remove the need to manage or provision infrastructure for our pods.

As a trend cloud vendors tend to use the word serverless quite loosely. While serverless comes in a lot of shapes and sizes and as long as the characteristics fit within the four categories from my last blog, it is a serverless service. To make sure that we’re all on the same page, I’ll use the following definition for serverless:

“Serverless is a development model where developers focus on a single unit of work and can deploy to a platform that automatically scales, without developer intervention.”

In this blog post, we’ll look at how that model works on AWS Fargate, which allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.

Using serverless requires us to change our mindset on how we build apps and requires us to unlearn things we learned building apps in the past. At AWS re:Invent I got a chance to do a VMware Code session and talk about how we took part of our ACME Fitness Shop and transformed it into serverless functions with AWS Lambda.

Containers were this awesome technology that ushered in the Cloud era and with a lot of new FaaS tools coming along, companies are wondering if they should jump the container ship altogether. As it turns out, containers definitely have value in Serverless. In this session we will take an existing containerized app and move it into AWS Fargate, look at the cost of running it, and how we can monitor it.

There are many predictions from market analyst firms on the size of the global serverless architecture market and how fast it will grow. The numbers range from $18B to $21.99B in the next few years with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the double digits. But is serverless only a fancy name for products like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions?

The CTO of a company I have worked for used to say that services should be loosely coupled but tightly integrated. I didn’t realize until a lot later how true that statement is as you’re building out microservices. How those microservices communicate with each other has also changed quite a bit. More often than not, they send messages using asynchronous protocols. As an industry, we decided that this new way of building apps should be called “Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).”

Imagine this, it’s 5pm on a Friday afternoon and while you really want to go enjoy the weekend, you also need to deploy a new version of your app to production. Using AWS CloudFormation (CF), you add a new instance to your fleet of EC2 instances to run your app.

In some cases you might want to get some data from cloud based systems to an environment that doesn’t expose APIs or ports to the outside world. Using webhooks makes that a little easier, but you still need a system that accepts webhooks and is able to get them across your firewall. That is exactly where Solace PubSub+ Cloud comes in! I’ve built a small webhook forwarder app, that gets data from Solace and sends it onwards without having any of my systems exposed to the Internet.

I’ve been playing with OpenFaas ever since I learned about Minikube a few years ago, so when one of my colleagues mentioned Google’s Distroless project I obviously needed to see if my Go projects could work using those images too.