Covers the concept behind serverless architectures, how Functions as a Service (FaaS) work and how to deploy such a serverless function.

1. Introduction to Serverless

2. What is Serverless?
• Serverless Book
• Serverless Conference
• Serverless Framework
• Serverless Inc.
• Serverless Architectures
• Serverless Application Model

7. Mike Roberts
“Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly
depend on third-party services (knows as Backend as a Service or
"BaaS") or on custom code that's run in ephemeral containers
(Function as a Service or "FaaS"), the best known vendor host of
which currently is AWS Lambda. By using these …”
https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

8. Function as a unit of application logic

9. How does it work?
• New instances based on invocation demand
• Events trigger a function

10. Check if an instance is running
Yes No
Handle the Request
Stop the Process
(stop the instance if idle to long)
Start an instanceActivate the Process

13. Isn’t that limiting?
Yes! 🙃

15. Benefits
• 📈 Auto scaling
• 💵 Pay per execution
• 🎪 Event Driven
• 🗝 Security

16. Common Use Cases
• 🕸 Web Applications
• 📱 Mobile & IoT Backends
• 💹 Data Processing
• 🤖 Chatbots

17. Providers
• AWS Lambda
• Google Cloud Functions
• Microsoft Functions
• IBM Openwhisk
• Auth0 Webtasks
• IronIO IronFunctions
• many more …

18. Numbers
• Thomson Reuter processes 4000 req/sec
• Finra processes half a trillion validations
of stock trades daily
• Vevo can handle spikes of 80x normal traffic

19. Challenges
• Monitoring
• Cold starts
• Development flow
• Application architecture
• Service Discovery
• Service Communication

20. Deployment Options
• User Interface
• API calls (Serverless Framework v0, Claudia, Zappa, Apex)
• CloudFormation (Serverless Framework v1, SAM)

21. Deploy via the UI

22. Deploy via the API
var params = {
Code: {},
Description: "",
FunctionName: "MyFunction",
Handler: "souce_file.handler_name",
MemorySize: 128,
Publish: true,
Role: "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/service-role/role-name",
Runtime: "nodejs4.3",
Timeout: 15,
VpcConfig: {}
};
lambda.createFunction(params, function(err, data) {
if (err) console.log(err, err.stack);
else console.log(data);
});

23. Deploy via CloudFormation

24. Deploy via Serverless Framework
# serverless.yml
service: serverless-simple-http-endpoint
frameworkVersion: ">=1.1.0 <2.0.0"
provider:
name: aws
runtime: nodejs4.3
functions:
currentTime:
handler: handler.endpoint
events:
- http:
path: ping
method: get

25. // handler.js
module.exports.endpoint = (event, context, callback) => {
const time = new Date().toTimeString();
const response = {
statusCode: 200,
body: JSON.stringify({
message: `Hello, the current time is ${time}.`,
}),
};
callback(null, response);
};

28. service: scheduled-cron-example
provider:
name: aws
runtime: nodejs4.3
functions:
cron:
handler: handler.run
events:
# Invoke Lambda function every minute
- schedule: rate(1 minute)
secondCron:
handler: handler.run
events:
# Invoke Lambda function every 2nd minute from Mon-Fri
- schedule: cron(0/2 * ? * MON-FRI *)

29. service: text-analysis-via-sns-post-processing
frameworkVersion: ">=1.1.0 <2.0.0"
provider:
name: aws
runtime: nodejs4.3
functions:
analyzeNote:
handler: analyzeNote.analyzeNote
events:
- sns: analyzeNote

30. Services
• Database
• FilesStorage
• Queues
• HTTP
• WebSockets
• IoT Management

32. Fin
Thanks for listening!
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