Tag: microsoft azure functions

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:

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 Peeps You Need To Follow

Posted in Serverless
Last Updated: January 9, 2019

In my never ending quest to consume all things serverless, I often find myself scouring the Interwebs for new and interesting serverless articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts. There are more and more people doing fascinating things with serverless every day, so finding content is becoming easier and easier. However, this increase in content comes with an increase in noise as well. Cutting through that noise isn’t always easy. 🙉

Great content with valuable insights

I personally love reading articles that introduce new use cases or optimizations for serverless. Stories about companies using serverless in production and how their architectures are set up are also extremely interesting. I’ve been working in the serverless space for several years now, and have come across a number of people who produce and/or share really great content. I’ve put together a list of people that I follow and enjoy their content regularly. Hopefully these people will help you learn to love serverless as much as I do. ❤️⚡️

Event Injection: Protecting your Serverless Applications

Posted in Programming & Serverless on June 26, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

Updated January 25, 2019: This post was updated based on feedback from the community.

The shared security model of cloud providers extends much further with serverless offerings, but application security is still the developer’s responsibility. Many traditional web applications are front-ended with WAFs (web application firewalls), RASPs (runtime application self-protection), EPPs (endpoint protection platforms) and WSGs (web security gateways) that inspect incoming and outgoing traffic. These extra layers of protection can save developers from themselves when making common programming mistakes that would otherwise leave their applications vulnerable. If you’re invoking serverless functions from sources other than API Gateway, you no longer have the ability to use the protection of a WAF.