In this talk, I discussed the value of experimenting in the cloud and doing so in a tasteful manner (i.e. don't put your experiments into production!). I shared a number of interesting experiments that the serverless community has done, and some ideas and learning that we can take from them.

1. DON’T
TRY
THESE
AT
HOME

3. SPOILERS!!!

4. dream lvl 1
dream lvl 2
dream lvl 3
dream lvl 4
dream lvl 5

7. always telling people not
to do something,
and then does it himself!

8. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition

9. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
monkey see,
monkey do

10. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
application of
best practices

11. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
effectively combine
practices, and deviates
from them as needed

12. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition

13. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
“transcends reliance on rules, guidelines and maxims”
“intuitive grasp of situations based on deep understanding”

14. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
“transcends reliance on rules, guidelines and maxims”
“intuitive grasp of situations based on deep understanding”
“uses an analytical approach in new situations”

15. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
“transcends reliance on rules, guidelines and maxims”
“intuitive grasp of situations based on deep understanding”
“uses an analytical approach in new situations”
how do we get there?

16. doing the same thing everyday is
going to get you there
NOT

17. true expertise requires deliberate learning

18. 10,000 hours of deliberate
practice to reach the top of an
ultra-competitive field

21. 10,000 hours of deliberate
practice to reach the top of an
ultra-competitive field

22. that’s the 6th walk today
WTF is a pokemon?

24. pickle Rick!

25. spent decades in LIMBO!

26. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
experimentation

27. value of experiments to

28. value of experiments to
but, do them tastefully

29. they will be g00d for you, too!

30. 1. do experiment
2. write a blog post
3. do a talk at user groups or conferences

31. pubby
do. write. speak.

32. pubby
do. write. speak.
REPEAT!

34. here be experiments…

37. scrapping
snapshotting SPA
E2E testing
visual testing
bots
generating PDFs/PNGs/open graph images, etc.
rendering canvas animations

42. metaprogramming: programs that can program itself

43. a Lambda function…
have read-access to its own code

44. a Lambda function…
have read-access to its own code
can update its own configuration

45. a Lambda function…
have read-access to its own code
can update its own configuration
can update its event source mappings

46. functions can self-optimize

47. e.g. adjust memory/timeout dynamically to
deal with back-pressure

48. functions can deploy updates to itself
updating function configuration causes all warm
lambdas to be killed immediately

49. e.g. slow-changing, static data in global vars
or environment vars

50. auto-generated APIs
learning chatbot
self-healing architectures
inlined IAM role-changes
self-building functions
…

53. complexity!

54. hard to test

55. security? what security!?

56. im-immutable infrastructure

58. local lambda
golang SSH server
ngrok

59. lambdashell.com

62. avoids Lambda timeouts!
no need for recursive function

64. relies on implementation details that can
change without notice

66. local lambda
node debugger
broker
proxy lib

68. there are easier ways to debug code

69. there are easier ways to debug code
SAM local, sls invoke local, serverless-offline,
docker-lambda, etc.

71. bridge network endpoints
to local MAC address

74. DO try these
at home

77. setup time

78. setup time initialization

79. setup time initialization
cold start

81. more memory =
slower cold start!

82. doesn’t take improved execution time
(from higher memory) into account

83. experiment against realistic workload

86. setup time initialization
cold start

88. full AWS-SDK vs.
DynamoDB only

89. full AWS-SDK vs.
DynamoDB only
webpack!!

91. saves ~25ms for every IO op

94. EXPERIMENTS
ARE
GOOD

95. Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition
experimentation

96. DON’T
TRY
THESE
AT
HOME WORK

98. headless Chrome in Lambda: http://bit.ly/2FaA2W4
SSH into a Lambda function: http://bit.ly/2KTnKVE
Trek10’s live Lambda debugger: https://github.com/trek10inc/aws-lambda-debugger
TCP stack over CloudWatch Logs: http://bit.ly/2ZvhbfR
the “Richard Linklayer” project: https://github.com/smithclay/rlinklayer
Tom Wallace “metaprogramming in Lambda”: http://bit.ly/2WMY9VB
Lambda internals: http://bit.ly/2WMqYRT
running Docker in Lambda: http://bit.ly/2IQ7lhY
the “scar” project for running Docker in Lambda: https://github.com/grycap/scar
investigation into Lambda coldstart time: http://bit.ly/2WL1uj0
how expensive is the AWS SDK: http://bit.ly/2Udjl0U
optimized AWS SDK layer: https://github.com/lumigo/lambda-layer-optimized-aws-sdk

101. Friday, 5pm