Serverless Architecture Patterns

And Best Practices

Arun Gupta Adrian Hornsby
Principal Technologist Cloud Architecture Evangelist
argu@amazon.com adhorn@amazon.com
@arungupta @adhorn
arun-gupta adhorn

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Agenda
1. Serverless Key Concepts
2. Lambda Basics
3. Lambda Best Practices
4. Serverless Application Model
5. CI/CD using CodeStar
6. Monitoring
7. Event Processing
8. Real-time Streaming
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Serverless Key Concepts

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Serverless means…

No servers to provision Scales with usage

or manage

Never pay for idle Availability and fault tolerance

built in
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 Spectrum of AWS offerings

“On EC2” Managed Serverless

AWS Amazon Amazon

Amazon Amazon ES
Amazon EC2 Lambda Cognito Kinesis
EMR

Amazon Amazon Amazon

Amazon Amazon S3 DynamoDB SQS
ElastiCache Redshift

Microsoft SQL Amazon

Server RDS Amazon API Amazon AWS IoT
Gateway CloudWatch

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Lambda Basics

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Using AWS Lambda

Bring your own code Simple resource model

• Node.js, Java, Python, C#, • Select power rating from
Go 128 MB to 3 GB
• Bring your own libraries • CPU and network
(even native ones) allocated proportionately

Flexible use Flexible authorization

• Synchronous or • Securely grant access to
asynchronous resources and VPCs
• Integrated with other • Fine-grained control for
AWS services invoking your functions

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Lambda execution model
Synchronous (push) Asynchronous (event) Stream-based
Amazon Amazon Amazon
API Gateway SNS DynamoDB

Amazon Amazon
S3 Kinesis

/api/hello
reqs changes

AWS Lambda
service

AWS Lambda AWS Lambda

function function function

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Anatomy of a Lambda function

Handler() function Event object Context object

Function to be executed Data sent during Lambda Methods available to
upon invocation Function Invocation interact with runtime
information (request ID,
log group, etc.)

public String handleRequest(Book book, Context context) {

saveBook(book);

return book.getName() + " saved!";

}

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Lambda Best Practices

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Lambda Best Practices

• Separate the Lambda handler from core logic

public class BookPostHandler implements RequestHandler<Book, String> {

static DynamoDBMapper mapper = DDBUtil.getMapper();

public String handleRequest(Book book, Context context) {

System.out.println("Adding book: " + book);
saveBook(book);

return book.getName() + " saved!";

}

private void saveBook(Book book) {

mapper.save(book);
}
}

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Lambda Best Practices

• Minimize package size to necessities

<dependencies>
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.amazonaws/aws-lambda-java-core -->
<dependency>
<groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
<artifactId>aws-lambda-java-core</artifactId>
<version>1.1.0</version>
</dependency>

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.amazonaws/aws-java-sdk-dynamodb -->

<dependency>
<groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
<artifactId>aws-java-sdk-dynamodb</artifactId>
<version>1.11.127</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

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Lambda Best Practices

• Use Environment Variables to modify operational behavior

String region = System.getenv("AWS_REGION");

. . .
String bucket = System.getenv(“S3_BUCKET”);

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Lambda Best Practices

• Self-contain dependencies in your function package

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-shade-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.1.0</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>shade</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

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Lambda Best Practices

• Leverage “Max Memory Used” to right-size your functions

• Calculate 1000x all prime numbers < 1m

Memory Compute time Cost

128 MB 11.722965 secs $0.024628
256 MB 6.678945 secs $0.028035
512 MB 3.194954 secs $0.026830
1024 MB 1.465984sec $0.024638

https://github.com/jconning/lambda-cpu-cost
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Lambda Best Practices

• Delete large unused functions (75GB limit per region)

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 Meet
SAM!
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Serverless Application Model

CloudFormation extension optimized for serverless

New serverless resource types: functions, APIs, and tables

Supports anything CloudFormation supports

Open specification (Apache 2.0)

https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model
© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
SAM Template
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Description: Simple CRUD webservice.
Resources:
GetFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
Properties:
Handler: org.sample.aws.samlocal.BookGetHandler
Runtime: java8
CodeUri: ./target/sam-local-java-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Policies: AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
Timeout: 30
Environment:
Variables:
TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
Events:

}
GetResource:
Type: Api
Properties:
Path: /books
Method: get

Table:
Type: AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable
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SAM Commands

Package
Creates a deployment package (.zip file)
Uploads deployment package to an S3 bucket
Adds a CodeUri property with S3 URI
Deploy
Creates CloudFormation resources

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
SAM Local
• CLI for local testing of Serverless apps
• Works with Lambda functions and
“proxy style” APIs
• Response object and function logs
available on your local machine
• Currently supports Java, Node.js and
Python
• Accepting PRs

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-local
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CI/CD using AWS CodeStar, AWS
CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline

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Monitoring

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 AWS X-Ray Integration with Serverless

• Lambda instruments incoming requests for all

supported languages
• Lambda runs the X-Ray daemon on all languages
with an SDK

var AWSXRay = require(‘aws-xray-sdk-core‘);

AWSXRay.middleware.setSamplingRules(‘sampling-rules.json’);
var AWS = AWSXRay.captureAWS(require(‘aws-sdk’));
S3Client = AWS.S3();

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X-Ray Trace Example

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Event Processing

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Event driven

Event A on B triggers C A B C

Invocation Action

Lambda functions
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Event-driven platform

Invoked in response to events Access any service,

- Changes in data including your own
- Changes in state
Any custom

S3 event DynamoDB Kinesis

notifications Streams events

Such as…

SNS DynamoDB Lambda

SNS CloudTrail Cognito
events
Lambda functions
events events

Redshift Kinesis S3

Custom CloudWatch
events events

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Event-driven actions

S3: Lambda: S3:

Source Bucket Resize Images Destination Bucket

Triggered on
PUTs
Users upload photos

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AWS Step Functions:

Orchestrate a Serverless processing

workflow using AWS Lambda

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Real-time Streaming

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© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
 https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/supercell/
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Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to work with real-time
streaming data

Amazon Kinesis Amazon Kinesis Amazon Kinesis

Streams Analytics Firehose
• For Technical Developers • For all developers, data • For all developers, data
• Collect and stream data scientists scientists
for ordered, replay-able, • Easily analyze data • Easily load massive
real-time processing streams using standard volumes of streaming data
SQL queries into Amazon S3, Redshift,
ElasticSearch
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 Amazon Kinesis

Write: 1MB Shard 1 Read: 2MB

Shard 2
Shard 3
…
…
Shard n

Producers Consumers

** A shard is a group of data records in a stream

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 Processing a Kinesis Streams with AWS Lambda
Kinesis Stream

Shard 1 Shard 2 Shard 3 Shard 4 ... Shard n

Gets Records
1x per sec
10k records
...

• Single instance of Lambda function per shard

• Polls shard once per second
• Lambda function instances created and removed automatically as stream is scaled

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Kinesis Analytics
Use SQL to build real-time applications

Connect to streaming source

Easily write SQL code to process streaming data

Continuously deliver SQL results

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Real-time Analytics Demo

http://quad.adhorn.me
Real-time analytics

Amazon
Cognito

Amazon Amazon Amazon Amazon Amazon

Kinesis Kinesis Kinesis Lambda DynamoDB
JavaScript SDK Stream Analytics Stream

Amazon S3
Further Reading
Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/serverless-architectures-with-aws-lambda.pdf

Optimizing Enterprise Economics with Serverless Architectures

https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/optimizing-enterprise-economics-serverless-architectures.pdf

Serverless Applications Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Serverless-Applications-Lens.pdf

Streaming Data Solutions on AWS with Amazon Kinesis

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/whitepaper-streaming-data-solutions-on-aws-with-amazon-kinesis.pdf

AWS Serverless Multi-Tier Architectures

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Serverless_Multi-Tier_Archiectures.pdf

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More info:

https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/

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 Thank you!

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