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I love serverless, but it got something dramatically wrong

Posted in Cloud & Serverless on September 17, 2023

This is a repost of a recent Twitter/X post:

I love #serverless, but IMO, it got something dramatically wrong.

It too closely coupled the underlying cloud infra with your app & business logic. This not only creates a bifurcation of business logic akin to Stored Procedures, but in many cases, ties the performance of your…

— Jeremy Daly is building @amptdev (@jeremy_daly) September 15, 2023

Serverless too closely coupled the underlying cloud infrastructure with your app and business logic. This not only creates a bifurcation of business logic akin to Stored Procedures, but in many cases, ties the performance of your application to the architectural decisions you’ve baked into your app code.

Rather than deploying apps to environments designed to support them – maintained, monitored, and optimized by platform engineers, serverless requires “developers” to understand the impact of choosing one statically configured primitive over another.

This *is* hard. The expectation that any one person can understand the complexities and nuances of several AWS (or other cloud providers’) services, while also being a competent Java, Rust, Python, etc. developer is naive at best. What you don’t know you don’t know is MUCH worse than what you know you don’t know.

I interviewed a 22 yo kid one time that said he was an EXPERT at Microsoft SQL Server. When I asked how long he had been using it, he replied, “Almost a year!” 🤦‍♂️

This isn’t only an incredibly stupid thing to say, it’s extremely DANGEROUS! You’re just one misconfigured Retention Policy, public S3 bucket, or IAM “*” permission away from something very, very bad happening. And this is why Terraform dominates the market, because most devs probably SHOULD NOT be trusted to deploy whatever they want to the cloud.

Platform engineering has been around for quite some time now (despite the recent buzz), and that’s because organizations are trying to allow their developers to be more productive, but in a way that doesn’t compromise security, performance, and cost.

There are plenty of Infrastructure As Code (IaC) tools that shift these burdens onto the developer. Lots of them are very good for those developers looking to move towards cloud architect roles (which are definitely needed in modern organizations). But all of these tools presuppose that developers actually want this! Or perhaps, even more naively, assume that working developers that don’t spend all day on Twitter (or X) actually have the time to invest in learning new services and digesting the latest feature added to Lambda (and how it could impact/help their customers).

I will reiterate: I LOVE #SERVERLESS. I think that deploying applications using serverless technology when possible is the fastest way to build highly resilient, global scale, virtually management free solutions. But upskilling an organization to get to that point can take years, succeeding only after running hundreds of experiments and having suffered countless failures.

I believe that the vast majority of developers just want to write code, and more importantly, solve their users’ problems. But developers also need to be able to harness the power of the Public Cloud. In order to do this, a radically different approach is required.

This is why we built Ampt. Not because we’re trying to restrict developers, but because we’re trying to FREE them. If you’re curious what this is all about, be sure to join our Launch Day livestream on September 20, 2023.

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Serverless Caching with Momento and MongoDB

Posted in Cloud, Databases & Serverless on June 1, 2023

A lot has changed in the 8 years since I started building serverless applications. What used to be a great tool for a limited set of use cases has turned into an extremely powerful ecosystem filled with products, services, and frameworks that not only negate nearly every objection, but allows developers to build native cloud applications very quickly. Recently there have been numerous investments in “serverless databases” to bring familiar RDBMS offerings to the growing number of serverless workloads. I’ve seen some very promising progress in this area, but for me, I’m still a big fan of using NoSQL solutions with my serverless applications.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the capabilities of MySQL and Postgres, but NoSQL databases have a combination of flexibility, scalability, and connection methods that highly complement a serverless approach. I have a lot of experience with Amazon DynamoDB and Cassandra, both excellent solutions for the right use cases, but I’ve always loved MongoDB and the flexibility of its query language. About a year ago, MongoDB made a serverless version of their MongoDB Atlas service generally available, which prompted me to take another look. I’ve been impressed so far, and I look forward to even more progress.

Even though MongoDB is widely appreciated for its flexibility and versatility, like any database system, when you scale up and usage increases, performance will likely take a hit. That’s where caching comes in. Traditionally, the problem with caching in serverless applications, at least in the AWS ecosystem, is that you had to both run your Lambda functions in a VPC (which limits access to the Internet without a Managed NAT Gateway) and you had to provision an ElastiCache cluster and manage it yourself. Then late last year, I discovered Momento, a serverless cache that was truly serverless. You only pay for what you use and it instantly scales to meet your workloads. Serverless had been missing a great caching solution, but now with Momento in hand, we can do some pretty amazing things without adding all that extra overhead.

In this post, let’s take a look at some of the benefits of adding a serverless cache like Momento in front of your MongoDB cluster, as well as some real world examples where caching can supercharge your serverless application backed by MongoDB.

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Serverless take the wheel

Posted in Cloud & Serverless on March 17, 2023

More control is a good thing, right? I mean, who doesn’t want the ability to twist every knob and tweak every settings to your heart’s desire so that each minute detail of your infrastructure is artisanally handcrafted? I’ll tell you who: this guy! Why? Because I have neither the time, energy, nor expertise to even begin to understand the impact of most of those configuration changes. Not only that, but I likely don’t even have the information needed to understand which optimizations are required, let alone a way to prioritize them.

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Serverless Platform Engineering

Posted in Cloud & Serverless on November 3, 2022

I’m a huge fan of Charity Majors, and I always learn something new when she shares her thoughts on anything that has to do with cloud and engineering. So when I came across this Twitter post, I grabbed some 🍿 and got ready to have my mind blown. I was not disappointed.

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Getting abstractions wrong with AWS SAM Serverless Connectors

Posted in Cloud & Serverless on October 27, 2022

I was intrigued when I first saw the announcement of AWS SAM Serverless Connectors. I don’t use SAM very much (if at all anymore), so it wasn’t the hope of this being some sort of silver bullet for my occasional IAM frustrations that got my attention. Rather, it was another opportunity to learn how AWS is trying to abstract away their mostly self-imposed complexity problems. Unfortunately, I think they missed the mark on this.

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Can serverless really save polar bears?

Posted in Cloud & Serverless on October 13, 2022

JV Roig wrote a great article recently about polar bears, serverless and sustainability. The premise is quite simple: if we make better choices in the cloud, we can reduce our impact on the environment, and thus, save the polar bears. The sentiment is nice, but it is, of course, much more complicated than that. This begs the question, how much impact can our cloud choices really have?

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Is learning serverless really that hard?

Posted in Cloud & Serverless on October 6, 2022

I came across Paul Johnston’s Learning Serverless (and why it is hard) post one Saturday morning, and ended up with a sore neck because I was nodding in agreement the entire time I was reading it. Okay, maybe the neck pain had more to do with how I slept the night before, but I’m quite sure the agreeing nods contributed. But when it comes to learning serverless, a little bit of neck pain, IMO, is the least of your problems.

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Let’s talk about the cloud skills gap

Posted in Cloud, Productivity & Serverless on September 30, 2022

Lydia Leong recently wrote a thought-provoking piece suggesting that cloud adoption will fail because of the skills gap. This certainly isn’t (or shouldn’t be) news to those of us paying attention. The cloud has become progressively more complex as it has matured. There has been an explosion of cloud services, a rapid expansion of public cloud competitors that are achieving (or exceeding) feature parity for the most common use cases, and a third-party market that now contains more than 1,000 “cloud-native” tools, services, and platforms.

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Ensuring Data Integrity with DynamoDB

Posted in Databases, DynamoDB & Serverless on December 16, 2021

DynamoDB is an incredibly powerful NoSQL database. It’s schema-less, which gives you lots of flexibility, but it also means that you are responsible for managing the integrity of your data. This includes ensuring the structure of your data, as well as the ability to preserve metadata throughout your data’s lifecycle.

Unfortunately, DynamoDB doesn’t currently store any metadata associated with items. If you want to know when a particular item was written to the table, for example, you have to store that information yourself. While it’s not particularly difficult to add these attributes to an item, maintaining their integrity can come with some challenges.

In this article, we’ll discuss several strategies that can be used to ensure data integrity in your DynamoDB tables.

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Aurora Serverless v2: The Good, the Better, and the Possibly Amazing

Posted in Serverless on December 4, 2020
Last Updated: December 9, 2020

Three years ago at re:Invent 2017, AWS announced the original Amazon Aurora Serverless preview. I spent quite a bit of time with it, and when it went GA 9 months later, I published my thoughts in a post titled Aurora Serverless: The Good, the Bad and the Scalable.

If you read the post, you’ll see that I was excited and optimistic, even though there were a lot of missing features. And after several months of more experiments, I finally moved some production workloads onto it, and had quite a bit of success. Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen some improvements to the product (including support for PostgreSQL and the Data API), but there were still loads of problems with the scale up/down speeds, failover time, and lack of Aurora provisioned cluster features.

That all changed with the introduction of Amazon Aurora Serverless v2. I finally got access to the preview and spent a few hours trying to break it. My first impression? This thing might just be a silver bullet!

I know that’s a bold statement. 😉 But even though I’ve only been using it for a few hours, I’ve also read through the (minimal) docs, reviewed the pricing, and talked to one of the PMs to understand it the best I could. There clearly must be some caveats, but from what I’ve seen, Aurora Serverless v2 is very, very promising. Let’s take a closer look!

Update December 9, 2020: I’ve updated the post with some more information after having watched the “Amazon Aurora Serverless v2: Instant scaling for demanding workloads” presentation by Murali Brahmadesam (Director of Engineering, Aurora Databases and Storage) and Chayan Biswas (Principle Product Manager, Amazon Aurora). The new images are courtesy of their presentation.

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Making the Case for Serverless Use Cases

Posted in Programming & Serverless on May 2, 2020

For quite some time, there was a running joke that “serverless” was just for converting images to thumbnails. That’s still a great use case for serverless, of course, but since AWS released Lambda in 2014, serverless has definitely come a long way. Even still, newcomers to the space often don’t realize just how many use cases there are for serverless. I spoke with Gareth McCumskey, a Solutions Architect at Serverless Inc, on a recent two part episode (part 1 and part 2) of Serverless Chats, and we discussed nine very applicable use cases that I thought I’d share with you here.