Convince your boss to go Serverless at AWS User Group Tirupathi and Serverless Bangalore Meetup

Convince your boss to go
Serverless
by Vadym Kazulkin, ip.labs AWS User Group Tirupathi & Serverless Bangalore Meetup, 27 February 2021

Contact
Vadym Kazulkin
ip.labs GmbH Bonn, Germany
Co-Organizer of the Java User Group Bonn
and Serverless Bonn Meetup
v.kazulkin@gmail.com
@VKazulkin
@ServerlessBonn (Meetup)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadymkazulkin/
https://www.iplabs.de/

Let’s talk about the
challenges of the
software development in
general first

Cognitive Load –
the total amount of mental effort
being used in the working memory
• Intrinsic
• Extraneous
• Germane
https://teamtopologies.com/

Cognitive Load
• Intrinsic
• How to write a Java class or use a framework
(Spring)
• Extraneous
• Germane

Cognitive Load
• Intrinsic
• Extraneous
• How to automate tests (unit, integration, end-to-end, web, desktop, mobile)
• How to build, package, deploy and run my application
• How to configure monitoring, alerting, auto-scaling, logging and tracing
• How to operate and maintain infrastructure
• How to build-in fault-tolerance and resiliency
• How to make the hardware, networking and application secure
• Germane

Cognitive Load
• Intrinsic
• Extraneous
• Germane
• Domain Knowledge (payment, e-commerce)
• Business processes and workflows

Cognitive Load
• Intrinsic ->
become fluent in it
• Extraneous ->
minimize amount of what we
implement/operate/support/own by ourselves
• Germane ->
minimize amount of domains what we have to
implement by ourselves

What our boss wants from us?
… that we are productive

Productivity
We are productive if we regularly ship products,
which are successfully used by our customers

What is holding us back from
being productive?
Technical Debt - reflects the implied cost
of additional rework caused by choosing an
easy (limited) solution now instead of using
a better approach that would take longer
”The Cost of Poor Quality Software in the US: A 2018 Report”
https://www.it-cisq.org/the-cost-of-poor-quality-software-in-the-us-a-2018-report/The-Cost-of-Poor-Quality-Software-in-the-US-2018-Report.pdf

Technical Debt
• Even a perfect solution can become the technical debt over
the time
• Version of programming language comes out of support
(Java 8) and update requires some code changes
• Security considerations forces us to upgrade one of our
dependencies (library or web application server version)
• One of our dependencies (i.e. to open source project) is
discontinued

Technical Debt
Think of what can happen to your software over
the entire life cycle of your product

Technical Debt
• is related to amount of code written
• is related to amount of dependencies used
• open source projects, programming
languages, databases, (web) application
servers

Legacy Systems are systems that can’t
evolve
”The Cost of Poor Quality Software in the US: A 2018 Report”
https://www.it-cisq.org/the-cost-of-poor-quality-software-in-the-us-a-2018-report/The-Cost-of-Poor-Quality-Software-in-the-US-2018-Report.pdf
Legacy System

Evolutionary Architecture –
supports guided, incremental
change across multiple dimensions
• Incremental change
• Appropriate architectural coupling
• Fitness functions
”Architectural Coupling” https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/building-evolutionary-architectures/9781491986356/ch04.html

Evolutionary Architecture –
Fitness functions
• Source code metrics (such as measuring
cyclomatic complexity)
• Unit tests (% of coverage and % of success)
• Performance metrics (such as API latency or
throughput)
• Security (encryption at rest, e.g. checking that all S3
buckets have encryption enabled, or automatic key rotation
for all external APIs, with tools such as the AWS Secrets
Manager)
• ArchUnit, Sonar, CI/CD Tools
• CodeCommit,…CodeDeploy, Jenkins
Danilo Poccia „ Serverless + Evolutionary Architectures + Safe Deployments = Speed in the Right Direction”
https://blog.usejournal.com/serverless-evolutionary-architectures-safe-deployments-speed-in-the-right-direction-7b4b01e27254

The Value Proposition of
Serverless
But let’s talk about of Total Cost of Ownership of
the Serverless paradigm

TCO Full Picture
No Infrastructure
Operation and
Maintenance
Forrest Brazeal „The Business Case For Serverless” https://www.trek10.com/blog/business-case-for-serverless

No Infrastructure Maintenance
Is infrastructure maintenance and
operation your core competency ?

TCO Full Picture
No Infrastructure
Operation and
Maintenance
Auto Scaling and
Fault Tolerance
Built in

Auto Scaling And Fault Tolerance
Built In
• Can you get capacity planning
and auto scaling right?
• Do you want to solve the hard problem
of fault tolerance by yourself?

TCO Full Picture
No Infrastructure
Operation and
Maintenance
Auto Scaling and
Fault Tolerance
Built in
Own less,
build more

Own less, build more
By heavily relying on the managed
Serverless services you
• Need fewer engineers to start
implementing your new product idea
• Can do more with the same amount of
people

TCO Full Picture
No Infrastructure
Operation and
Maintenance
Auto Scaling and
Fault Tolerance
Built in
Own less,
build more
Lower technical
debt

Lower technical debt
• Whatever code you write today is always tomorrow’s technical
debt © Paul Johnston
• Less code means lower technical debt
• Time and effort required for maintaining the solution over its whole
lifecycle is by far much more than for developing it
Jeff Atwood „The Best Code is No Code At All” https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-best-code-is-no-code-at-all/
Paul Johnston “Cloud 2.0: Code is no longer King — Serverless has dethroned it”
https://medium.com/@PaulDJohnston/cloud-2-0-code-is-no-longer-king-serverless-has-dethroned-it-c6dc955db9d5

TCO Full Picture
No Infrastructure
Operation and
Maintenance
Auto Scaling and
Fault Tolerance
Built in
Own less,
build more
Lower technical
debt
Focus on Business
Value and Innovation

Focus On Business Value and
Innovation
Every organization wants exactly this!

TCO Full Picture
No Infrastructure
Operation and
Maintenance
Auto Scaling and
Fault Tolerance
Built in
Own less,
build more
Lower technical
debt
Faster Time to
Market
Focus on Business
Value and Innovation

Faster Time To Market
• Time To Market is the key differentiator in
today’s business!
• Ask yourself: what is core for your business
and what you can get as Commodity +(Utility)
as a Service?

Serverless Mindset at ip.labs
“Accelerate Innovation and Maximize Business Value with Serverless Applications”
https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/accelerate-innovation-and-maximize-business-value-with-serverless-applications-srv212r1-aws-reinvent-2018

How to measure success
Let’s focus on software delivery and operational performance
(how to do the things right)
• Provide the boss metrics, that we’re on the right path
• See from the developer’s perspective how to achieve it and improve
It’s also important to the right thing!

How to measure success
See DORA State of DevOps 2018-2019 Reports

Software Delivery and
Operational Performance

Example: strategies to reduce
time to restore service

Blue-Green
deployment
“Win-Win Deployment Strategies for Modern Apps” https://rollbar.com/blog/deployment-strategies/
Canary
deployment

AWS Lambda Deployment
Best Practices:
• API Gateway Stage variables and Lambda
Aliases
• Lambda Alias Traffic Shifting
Chris Munns: “Testing and Deployment Best Practices for AWS Lambda-Based Applications”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJQDAsWm-5k&list=LLYgjRSI2oCzI9eooyFrWR7A&index=1

AWS Lambda Deployment
Best Practices
• AWS Lambda Alias Canary and Linear Traffic
Shifting & AWS SAM Safe Deployments
• CloudWatch Rollback Alarms & Lambda hooks
Chris Munns: “Testing and Deployment Best Practices for AWS Lambda-Based Applications”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJQDAsWm-5k&list=LLYgjRSI2oCzI9eooyFrWR7A&index=1

Time Spent
Measure if Serverless increasses the time spent on
New Work (producing business value and innovation)

Using Serverless ecosystem will
with the right engineering practices in place will
significantly reduce
• extraneous and germane cognitive load
• the amount “staff” owned
• the amount of code written

How to write less code with
AWS Serverless services 1/2
• Write fewer Lambda functions
• use direct AWS service integrations in case the Lambda only
calls the AWS service itself

Less Lambda functions means less:
• code to write, test, run and maintain
• CI/CD (deploy, rollback strategies) to maintain
• Infrastructure as a Code (IAM policies, permission) to write and test
• cold-start worries
• point of failures and retries
• security concerns
• worries about Lambda limits (e.g. concurrency settings per AWS account)
• spending on Lambda, CloudWatch and 3rd party SaaS on (AWS) (monthly) bill
Sheen Brisals “Don’t wait for Functionless. Write less Functions instead”
https://medium.com/lego-engineering/dont-wait-for-functionless-write-less-functions-instead-8f2c331cd651

How to write less code with
AWS Serverless services 2/2
• Write fewer Lambda functions
• use more direct service integrations in case the Lambda only calls the
Service itself
• Write less Infrastructure as a Code
• applies not only for Lambda but also to other services like AWS Amplify
• Use (AWS) Services/Frameworks which provide meaningful abstractions
• Amplify Framework or Serverless Framework Components

Concrete examples how to write less code with
AWS Serverless services
• API Gateway Service Integration
• HTTP APIs Storage-First Service
Integration
• Step Functions Service Integration
• Event Bridge Filtering and Routing
• Lambda Destinations
• Export DynamoDB Table Data to S3
• Native integration between SNS
and Kinesis Data Firehose
• Amplify Framework
• Serverless Framework
Components

Sheen Brisals “Don’t wait for Functionless. Write less Functions instead”
https://medium.com/lego-engineering/dont-wait-for-functionless-write-less-functions-instead-8f2c331cd651
API Gateway Service Integration

API Gateway Service Integration with
Dynamo DB : Example ID generator 1/2
Sheen Brisals “Sequence Numbering in Serverless via API Gateway”
https://medium.com/lego-engineering/sequence-numbering-in-serverless-via-api-gateway-40e5f6c83e93
https://github.com/ToQoz/api-gateway-mapping-template

API Gateway Service Integration with
Dynamo DB : Example ID generator
Sheen Brisals “Sequence Numbering in Serverless via API Gateway”
https://medium.com/lego-engineering/sequence-numbering-in-serverless-via-api-gateway-40e5f6c83e93
https://github.com/ToQoz/api-gateway-mapping-template

Eric Johnson “https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/building-storage-first-applications-with-http-apis-service-integrations/”
HTTP APIs Storage-First Service
Integration
• Event Bridge
• Kinesis Data Streams
• SQS
• AppConfig
• Step Functions

Step Functions Service Integration
“Service Integrations with AWS Step Functions” https://docs.aws.amazon.com/step-functions/latest/dg/concepts-service-integrations.html

Event Bridge Filtering and Routing
“Reducing custom code by using advanced rules in Amazon EventBridge”
https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/reducing-custom-code-by-using-advanced-rules-in-amazon-eventbridge/

Lambda Destinations
“Introducing AWS Lambda Destinations” https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-lambda-destinations/
https://www.trek10.com/blog/lambda-destinations-what-we-learned-the-hard-way

Export DynamoDB Table Data to S3
https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-export-amazon-dynamodb-table-data-to-data-lake-amazon-s3/

Native integration between SNS
and Kinesis Data Firehose
https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/introducing-message-archiving-and-analytics-for-amazon-sns/ /

Amplify Framework
AppSync and Direct Lambda
Resolvers
https://aws.amazon.com/de/appsync
“Introducing Direct Lambda Resolvers: AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs without VTL” https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/mobile/appsync-direct-lambda/

AWS Amplify and Admin GUI
https://docs.amplify.aws/console/adminui/intro#access-outside-the-aws-management-console/

Serverless Framework Components
https://www.serverless.com/blog/what-are-serverless-components-how-use

Serverless with the focus on you
core domains will enable
• iterative development mind set
• experimentation culture
• focus on business value, innovation (New
Work), and faster time to market
• evolutionary architectures

Your boss will ask you after all that
Is Serverless a silver bullet ?

Image: https://stock.adobe.com

1. Application lifecycle
2. Workloads
3. Programming Model
4. Platform limitations
5. Cost at scale
6. Organizational environment
7. Platform and tooling maturity
Decision Checklist: understand your…
Christian Bannes and Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

Understand
Application
lifecycle
Christian Posta „Be as serverless as you can, but not more than that” https://blog.christianposta.com/serverless/its-not-about-microservices-vs-serverless/

Explore phase
• Quickly validate
hypotheses
• Rapidly experiment
• Run experiments as
cheaply as possible
Serverless is a perfect fit
Image: burst.shopify.com/photos/a-look-across-the-landscape-with-view-of-the-sea Christian Bannes and Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

Exploit phase
• Built something that does
provide customer value
• Build it on scale
• Build a profitable product
around it
partly serverless and partly not
serverless architecture
Image: Robert Scoble via Flickr Christian Bannes and Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

Application lifecycle
• How much of my stack should I own
to be able to deliver business value?
• What should I outsource to my
service provider : SLA, regulatory
compliance, price, and roadmap?
Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

Existing
applications
• You can’t magically move
them to the cloud providers
(especially make your
application Serverless)
• You can try to modernize
parts of them

Strangler
Pattern
• Add a proxy (API
Gateway or Application
Loadbalancer), which
sits between the legacy
application and the user
• Add new services and
link it to the proxy
Marin Fowler „StrangerFigApplication” https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html Christian Bannes and Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

FinDev Concept
Activity-based costing on a
digital operation-by-operation
basis
• Figure out features which deliver
business value comparing to their
cost
Aleksander Simovic & Mark Schwarz „FinDev and Serverless Microeconomics: Part 1”
https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/enterprise-strategy/findev-and-serverless-microeconomics-part-1/

1. Application lifecycle
2. Workloads
3. Programming Model
4. Platform limitations
5. Cost at scale
6. Organizational environment
7. Platform and tooling maturity

The reality is…
Lambda is often just a
small percentage
of your total cost.
Even more with recently
introduced 1ms billing
granularity
Vadym Kazulkin, @VKazulkin

Understand your cost at scale
• Lambda
• API Gateway
• Dynamo DB capacity choices
• Event Sources (SQS, SNS,
EventBridge, Kinesis)
• Step Functions

Understand your cost at scale
• Logging costs (AWS CloudWatch Logs)
• Monitoring costs (AWS CloudWatch)
• Tracing (AWS X-Ray)
• Remote API calls / 3rd party services
price models

Understand organizational
environment (structure,
reponsibilities, knowledge,
culture)
• Do you already embrace
DevOps best practices?

Charity Majors: „The Future of Ops careers“
• Advocates for the internal observability team (even if you pay for
SaaS observability solution and you use Serverless-first approach)
• team should write libraries, generate examples, and drive
standardization; ushering in consistency, predictability, and usability
• team should partner with internal teams to evaluate use cases. They
might also write glue code and helper modules to connect different
data sources and create cohesive visualizations
• team becomes an integration point between your organization and the
outsourced work
Charity Majors „The Future of Ops Careers”
https://thenewstack.io/the-future-of-ops-careers

Tom McLaughlin Talk:
What do we do when
the server goes away?
• Observability (Logging,
Monitoring, Tracing, & Alerting
• Chaos Engineering & Game Days
• Help understand constraints
of AWS services & choose the right
one
Tom McLaughlin „What do we do when the server goes away”
https://speakerdeck.com/tmclaugh/serverless-devops-what-do-we-do-when-the-server-goes-away
Charity Majors „The Future of Ops Careers” https://thenewstack.io/the-future-of-ops-careers Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

Help understand constraints of AWS services &
choose the right one. Example Event Sources:

Co-evolution of practices with
Serverless 1/2
• True DevOps
• Complete infrastructure automation
• Chaos Engineering
• FinDev responsibilities in the teams
Sheen Brisals “Why the ‘WHY’ matters more than the ‘WHAT’ in Serverless!”
https://medium.com/lego-engineering/why-the-why-matters-more-than-the-what-in-serverless-2ef56c397962
DevOps Topologies: https://web.devopstopologies.com/

Co-evolution of practices with
Serverless 2/2
• Each team or even developer can have its
own (AWS test) account per feature or service
• Only minimal local testing (quick functional
tests)
• Adopt “testing in production”
Michael Bryzek “What do you know about testing in production?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-ATZTUgaAo

Invest in Software Delivery and
Operational Performance Excellence

Serverless platform and tooling maturity
• Infrastructure-as-a-Code
solutions maturity
• with AWS Cloud Formation, AWS CDK
• Development environment &
framework maturity
• with AWS SAM, AWS Amplify and
Serverless Framework
Image: http://tea.solgenomics.net/anatomy_viewer/microscopy/slm82_fruit Vadym Kazulkin @VKazulkin , ip.labs GmbH

Serverless platform and tooling maturity
• CI/CD
• with AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild,
CodePipeline and CodeDeploy
• Observability (Logging,
Monitoring, Tracing, Alerting)
• with AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray
• Integration with 3rd party SaaS
• with AWS Lambda Extensions (Epsagon,
HashiCorp, Lumigo, Thundra, Datadog)
• with AWS EvenBridge (PagerDuty,
Zendesk, Shopify, Datadog)
Image: http://tea.solgenomics.net/anatomy_viewer/microscopy/slm82_fruit
AWS Lambda Extensions https://aws.amazon.com/de/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/aws-lambda-extensions-integrate-operational-tools/

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