Challenges in serverless computing, can we finally focus on just business logic? The promise of every new tech in the software industry is to make developers focus on the business logic without dealing with the underlying platform. Serverless technologies are no exception. In this talk, I will talk about my experiences as a developer while my development stack moves towards serverless technologies. I will talk about the pain points of AWS Lambda and how changing the mindset of old enterprise web development to developing for stateless event-driven systems helped me to reduce these pain points. When serverless architecture gets bigger and more complex, troubleshooting when something unexpected goes wrong becomes the biggest challenge. I will talk about the difference between traditional monitoring solutions and serverless monitoring solutions and show a demo of our monitoring solution Thundra.

1. SERVERLESS CHALLENGES
İBRAHİM GÜRSES

2. WHO AM I?
▸ Graduated From Bilkent University CS in 2011 in Ankara
▸ Software Engineer @Thundra
▸ 8 years of coding experience mostly in Java Enterprise
Applications
▸ Co-Founder of Ankara Cloud Meetup
▸ AWS Certified Developer Associate

3. AGENDA
▸ Serverless Introduction
▸ AWS Lambda and popular server less architecture
▸ My Story with AWS Lambda
▸ Development Story of Thundra
▸ Thundra Demo

4. SERVERLESS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXaZAFi3Ytk

5. SERVERLESS

6. WHAT IS SERVERLESS?
BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service)

7. WHAT IS SERVERLESS?
FaaS (Function as a Service)
Host
Instance
Application
Process
OPERATION
OPERATION
OPERATION
FaaS Platform
OPERATION

8. COMMON TRAITS OF SERVERLESS FRAMEWORK
#1
RESTFUL
INTERFACES
#2
EVENT
DRIVEN
#3
POLYGLOT
SERVICES
#4
STATELESS
#5
NARROWLY
FOCUSED
#6
SHORT
RUNNING

9. FAAS TRIGERING EVENTS
▸ Message Bus
▸ Network File Systems
▸ Time Event
▸ Http Endpoint

10. COMMON TRAITS OF SERVERLESS FRAMEWORK
▸ No management of server hosts of server processes
▸ Self auto-scale and auto provision on loads
▸ Cost are based on precise usage (0 usage = 0 cost)
▸ Performance capabilities defined in terms other than host
size/count
▸ Implicit High Availability

11. BENEFITS
▸ Reduced Labor Cost
▸ Reduced Risk
▸ Reduced Infra Cost
▸ Increased scaling flexibility
▸ Shorter load time

12. PROBLEMS
▸ Loss of Control
▸ Loss of Server Optimization
▸ DoS Yourself
▸ Vendor lock-in (Maybe not)
▸ Tooling
▸ Testing(Embrace the cloud)
▸ Latency
▸ State? What State?
▸ Managed Services are moving targets

13. LAMBDA OS UPDATE

14. STILL NEED GREAT ENGINEERS
▸ Everything is Event Driven
▸ Functions should be
idempotent
▸ Stateless with a twist
▸ Choose additional tools
wisely

15. USE CASE & NOT SO GREAT
▸ Latency tolerant, async app
▸ Latency tolerant, sync app
NOT SO GREAT
USE CASE
▸ Low Latency & sync app (<10ms)
▸ Large scale and stateful

16. SERVERLESS IS MORE SECURE
▸ No Unpatched Servers
▸ No Snowflake Servers
▸ No SSH
▸ Every request is authorized and audible
▸ Functions are short-lived

17. MOTIVATION BEHIND SERVERLESS
https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/the-netflix-dynamic-scripting-platform-78c1b18b2a74

18. SERVERLESS MANIFESTO
▸ Functions are the unit of deployment and
scaling
▸ No machines, VMs or containers visible in the
programming model
▸ Permanent storage lives elsewhere
▸ Scales per request;
▸ Never pay for idle
▸ Implicitly fault-tolerant because functions can
run anywhere
▸ BYOC : Bring your own code
▸ Metrics, logging and traces are a universal right
http://alexander.holbreich.org/serverless-manifesto/

19. OBSERVABILITY
▸ Metrics
▸ Logs
▸ Traces
In control theory, observability is a measure of how well internal states of a system
can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. The observability and
controllability of a system are mathematical duals.
THREE PILLARS OF OBSERVABILITY

20. EVOLUTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING

21. SERVERLESS IS NOT PAAS
https://twitter.com/adrianco/status/736553530689998848

22. SHARED RESPONSIBILITY MODEL

23. AWS LAMBDA PROGRAMMING MODEL
▸ Handler
▸ The context object
▸ Logging
▸ Exception
▸ Events
▸ Resources

24. AWS LAMBDA PROGRAMMING MODEL

25. AWS LAMBDA PROGRAMMING MODEL
https://gist.github.com/kobalski/
e7115a01c924f03e6ee29cd3a62c5059

26. AWS LAMBDA LIMITS

27. PATTERN 1: WEB APP/ MICROSERVICES/API

28. PATTERN 2: FILE PROCESSING PIPELINE
Drawn with: https://cloudcraft.co/

29. HOLY GRAIL OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

30. J2EE 3 LAYERED ARCHITECTURE
https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1110754437834764288

31. TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS 3 YEARS AGO
▸ 5 minute execution limit
▸ Limited Language Runtime
▸ No SQS Event Trigger
▸ No Websockets
▸ No Serverless Databases
▸ No Libraries Code Sharing
▸ Limited vendor ecosystem

32. FRAMEWORKS FOR BUILDING SERVERLESS APPS

33. DEPLOYMENT

34. SERVERLEESS CRUD
Drawn with: https://cloudcraft.co/

35. OUR ARCHITECTURE

36. SERVERLESS MONOLITH
https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1117452467216601088

37. DON’T !!!

38. LEARN FROM FAILURES
▸ Wrote my first infinite recursive function, Big AWS Bill
▸ Run Lambda Inside VPC and deal with cold start
▸ See lambda might invoke twice in async invocation
▸ No concurrent execution limit. One lambda exhausted whole
system
▸ Run Lambda Inside VPC, ENI Exhaustion whole system down again
▸ Got my first out of memory error and time out error and not alerted
correctly
▸ Infinite retry with a kinesis shard, Big AWS Bill
https://cloudonaut.io/your-lambda-function-might-execute-twice-deal-with-it/
https://read.acloud.guru/does-aws-lambda-keep-its-serverless-marketing-promise-of-continuous-scaling-e990114bb379

39. $40.000 INCIDENT

40. NO OPS IS A DREAM IN SERVERLESS
https://twitter.com/berkay/status/925542116662620160

41. SERVERLESS SURVEY
https://serverless.com/blog/2018-serverless-
community-survey-huge-growth-usage/

42. EMBRACE THE MANAGED SERVICES
https://twitter.com/ShortJared/status/1100887501047132160

43. EMBRACE THE MANAGED SERVICES
Accept the discomfort of not owning your your own destiny.
Ben Kehoe

44. EMBRACE THE MANAGED SERVICES

45. WHAT IS THUNDRA?
The black box nature of AWS Lambda and other serverless environments means
that identifying and fixing performance issues is difficult and time-consuming.
Built for straightforward debugging, monitoring, and observability, Thundra
provides deep insight into your entire serverless environment. Starting from bird
eye view of your serverless architecture to the tiniest detail, Thundra collects and
correlates all your metrics, logs, and traces, allowing you to quickly identify
problematic invocations and also analyzes external services associated with that
function.
With Thundra’s zero overhead and automated instrumentation capabilities, your
developers are free to write code without worrying about bulking up their
Lambdas or wasting time on chasing black box problems.

46. WHAT IS THUNDRA?
From bird eye-view
To the tiniest details

47. PRODUCT OVERVIEW
▸ Flexible Instrumentation
▸ Zero Overhead
▸ Detailed Tracing
▸ Custom Querying
▸ Warm-Up
▸ Metric, trace log aggregation
▸ Debugging
▸ Chaos Engineering
▸ Architectural Overview

48. ZERO OVERHEAD

49. DEMO

50. QUESTIONS?