With the rise of cloud computing and modern distributed systems, we also witnessed the rise of a new practice area: DevOps. Despite being fundamental for smooth cloud operations, a dedicated DevOps practitioner is a luxury most teams can’t afford. Salaries average $130K in San Francisco, for example. When a dedicated DevOps practitioner is not available in our team, what should we do? The answer could unfold a multitude of aspects.
At this moment, billions of people are rushing to the internet for work, entertainment, shopping - everything, really. It’s great that we developed this virtual world and can keep the lights on, despite what’s happening outside. On the other hand, cloud systems and developers are under pressure to meet an unparalleled demand. At Dashbird, we have always thought developers deserve the most efficient tools to discover and resolve issues in order to keep cloud apps running smoothly.
Orchestrating and composing multiple services in a distributed architecture is not easy. Before we move along with the great solution offered by vending-machines to our distributed architectures, we need to understand what solutions and values we’re looking for. In a serverless environment, there are at least three desired properties of any distributed services implementation.
We did a compilation of all announcements from the AWS re:Invent 2019 that are relevant for Serverless teams, broken down by services.
Up until now, DynamoDB has been the only option of a truly serverless database battle-tested for production environments. Especially after launching the on-demand throughput capacity optimization, is a perfect-fit database engine for serverless projects.
API Gateway is a serverless service by AWS to expose cloud services through private or public HTTPs endpoints. It is used by many serverless teams to connect frontend applications to backend systems in a secure, scalable and seamless way. API Gateway integrates with Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and a variety of other AWS services. The main issue with API Gateway, so far, was its cost. At $3.50 per million requests, it can be more expensive than Lambda itself.
As our application scales and many services are accessing a multitude of data points for each workload needed, it is difficult to ensure each part of the system has the right set of data access permissions. In today’s world, one of the worse nightmares of a software business is data leaking and data privacy issues. Not only it affects the brand reputation, but could also expose the company to heavy fines and other regulatory sanctions.
Cold Starts have been a massive issue with FaaS. In summary, it makes functions slower to startup in some cases. That’s in the opposite way of every effort to improve web applications performance. Many efforts have been made in the recent years to solve AWS Lambda cold starts or educate on handling them. Many have mitigated the issue, but none really solved it. AWS has just made a great progress on the area with the Provisioned Capacity feature announcement.
The word serverless starts to become a hot topic in the world of Computer Programming. Maybe you heard the word Serverless a couple of times, either by going to conferences or by talking with other people.
