Tag: aws - Page 2 of 3

re:Capping re:Invent: AWS goes all-in on Serverless

Posted in Serverless on December 3, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

Last week I spent six incredibly exhausting days in Las Vegas at the AWS re:Invent conference. More than 50,000 developers, partners, customers, and cloud enthusiasts came together to experience this annual event that continues to grow year after year. This was my first time attending, and while I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, I left with not just the feeling that I got my money’s worth, but that AWS is doing everything in their power to help customers like me succeed.

There have already been some really good wrap-up posts about the event. Take a look at James Beswick’s What I learned from AWS re:Invent 2018, Paul Swail’s What new use cases do the re:Invent 2018 serverless announcements open up?, and All the Serverless announcements at re:Invent 2018 from the Serverless, Inc. blog. There’s a lot of good analysis in these posts, so rather than simply rehash everything, I figured I touch on a few of the announcements that I think really matter. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first I want to point out a few things about Amazon Web Services that I learned this past week.

Aurora Serverless Data API: An (updated) First Look

Posted in Serverless on November 21, 2018
Last Updated: April 22, 2020

Update June 5, 2019: The Data API team has released another update that adds improvements to the JSON serialization of the responses. Any unused type fields will be removed, which makes the response size 80+% smaller.

Update June 4, 2019: After playing around with the updated Data API, I found myself writing a few wrappers to handle parameter formation, transaction management, and response formatting. I ended up writing a full-blown client library for it. I call it the “Data API Client“, and it’s available now on GitHub and NPM.

Update May 31, 2019: AWS has released an updated version of the Data API (see here). There have been a number of improvements (especially to the speed, security, and transaction handling). I’ve updated this post to reflect the new changes/improvements.

On Tuesday, November 20, 2018, AWS announced the release of the new Aurora Serverless Data API. This has been a long awaited feature and has been at the top of many a person’s #awswishlist. As you can imagine, there was quite a bit of fanfare over this on Twitter.

Ya'll been waiting eagerly for this one! Access an Aurora Serverless database via HTTPS API: https://t.co/OUkqA8U3Y1 still in beta, but will change the way you think about #awsLambda and relational databases! #serverless

— Chris Munns (@chrismunns) November 21, 2018

Obviously, I too was excited. The prospect of not needing to use VPCs with Lambda functions to access an RDS database is pretty compelling. Think about all those cold start savings. Plus, connection management with serverless and RDBMS has been quite tricky. I even wrote an NPM package to help deal with the max_connections issue and the inevitable zombies 🧟‍♂️ roaming around your RDS cluster. So AWS’s RDS via HTTP seems like the perfect solution, right? ~~Well, not so fast. 😞~~ (Update May 31, 2019: There have been a ton of improvements, so read the full post.)

🚀 Project Update: November 20, 2018

Lambda API: v0.9.2 Released

Lambda API v0.9.2 has been released and contains additional updates and fixes for the index.d.ts TypeScript declarations file. Thanks again to @hassankhan and @Wintereise for submitting the changes. The release is immediately available via NPM. Read More...

Takeaways from ServerlessNYC 2018

Posted in Serverless on November 4, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

I had the opportunity to attend ServerlessNYC this week (a ServerlessDays community conference) and had an absolutely amazing time. The conference was really well-organized (thanks Iguazio), the speakers were great, and I was able to have some very interesting (and enlightening) conversations with many attendees and presenters. In this post I’ve summarized some of the key takeaways from the event as well as provided some of my own thoughts.

Note: There were several talks that were focused on a specific product or service. While I found these talks to be very interesting, I didn’t include them in this post. I tried to cover the topics and lessons that can be applied to serverless in general.

Update November 16, 2018: Some videos have been posted, so I’ve provided the links to them.

Audio Version:

🚀 Project Update: October 10, 2018

Lambda API: v0.8.1 Released

Lambda API v0.8.1 has been released to patch an issue with middleware responses and a path prefixing options bug. The release is immediately available via NPM. Read More...

An Introduction to Serverless Microservices

Posted in Programming & Serverless on September 25, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

Thinking about microservices, especially their communication patterns, can be a bit of a mind-bending experience for developers. The idea of splitting an application into several (if not hundreds of) independent services, can leave even the most experienced developer scratching their head and questioning their choices. Add serverless event-driven architecture into the mix, eliminating the idea of state between invocations, and introducing a new per function concurrency model that supports near limitless scaling, it’s not surprising that many developers find this confusing. 😕 But it doesn’t have to be. 😀

In this post, we’ll outline a few principles of microservices and then discuss how we might implement them using serverless. If you are familiar with microservices and how they communicate, this post should highlight how these patterns are adapted to fit a serverless model. If you’re new to microservices, hopefully you’ll get enough of the basics to start you on your serverless microservices journey. We’ll also touch on the idea of orchestration versus choreography and when one might be a better choice than the other with serverless architectures. I hope you’ll walk away from this realizing both the power of the serverless microservices approach and that the basic fundamentals are actually quite simple. 👊

Audio Version:

Managing MySQL at Serverless Scale

Posted in Programming, Serverless & Serverless MySQL on September 3, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

“What? You can’t use MySQL with serverless functions, you’ll just exhaust all the connections as soon as it starts to scale! And what about zombie connections? Lambda doesn’t clean those up for you, meaning you’ll potentially have hundreds of sleeping threads blocking new connections and throwing errors. It can’t be done!” ~ Naysayer

I really like DynamoDB and BigTable (even Cosmos DB is pretty cool), and for most of my serverless applications, they would be my first choice as a datastore. But I still have a love for relational databases, especially MySQL. It had always been my goto choice, perfect for building normalized data structures, enforcing declarative constants, providing referential integrity, and enabling ACID-compliant transactions. Plus the elegance of SQL (structured query language) makes organizing, retrieving and updating your data drop dead simple.

But now we have SERVERLESS. And Serverless functions (like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions) scale almost infinitely by creating separate instances for each concurrent user. This is a MAJOR PROBLEM for RDBS solutions like MySQL, because available connections can be quickly maxed out by concurrent functions competing for access. Reusing database connections doesn’t help, and even the release of Aurora Serverless doesn’t solve the max_connections problem. Sure there are some tricks we can use to mitigate the problem, but ultimately, using MySQL with serverless is a massive headache.

Well, maybe not anymore. 😀 I’ve been dealing with MySQL scaling issues and serverless functions for years now, and I’ve finally incorporated all of my learning into a simple, easy to use NPM module that (I hope) will solve your Serverless MySQL problems.

Serverless Microservice Patterns for AWS

Posted in Programming & Serverless
Last Updated: December 20, 2020

UPDATE: I’ve started the Serverless Reference Architectures Project that provides additional context and interactive architectures for some of theses patterns along with code examples to deploy them to AWS. Check it out.

I’m a huge fan of building microservices with serverless systems. Serverless gives us the power to focus on just the code and our data without worrying about the maintenance and configuration of the underlying compute resources. Cloud providers (like AWS), also give us a huge number of managed services that we can stitch together to create incredibly powerful, and massively scalable serverless microservices.

I’ve read a lot of posts that mention serverless microservices, but they often don’t go into much detail. I feel like that can leave people confused and make it harder for them to implement their own solutions. Since I work with serverless microservices all the time, I figured I’d compile a list of design patterns and how to implement them in AWS. I came up with 19 of them, though I’m sure there are plenty more.

In this post we’ll look at all 19 in detail so that you can use them as templates to start designing your own serverless microservices.

Audio Version:

🚀 Project Update: August 21, 2018

Lambda API: v0.8 Released

Lambda v0.8 is finally here and was well worth the wait! New features include allowing middleware to accept multiple handlers, new convenience methods for cache control and signing S3 URLs, and async/await support for the main function handler. And best of all, new LOGGING and SAMPLING support for you to add more observability into your APIs and web applications. Read More...

Aurora Serverless: The Good, the Bad and the Scalable

Posted in Serverless on August 12, 2018
Last Updated: April 22, 2020

Amazon announced the General Availability of Aurora Serverless on August 9, 2018. I have been playing around with the preview of Aurora Serverless for a few months, and I must say that overall, I’m very impressed. There are A LOT of limitations with this first release, but I believe that Amazon will do what Amazon does best, and keep iterating until this thing is rock solid.

The announcement gives a great overview and the official User Guide is chock full of interesting and useful information, so I definitely suggest giving those a read. In this post, I want to dive a little bit deeper and discuss the pros and cons of Aurora Serverless. I also want to dig into some of the technical details, pricing comparisons, and look more closely at the limitations.

Audio Version