A presentation at Serverless Days - Austin in in Austin, TX, USA by Chris Munns
Serverless is dead. Chris Munns Principal Developer Advocate AWS Serverless © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Why are we here today? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/mgifford/4525333972
Serverless is dead. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Echo Grid on Unsplash
But ServerlessDays? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless is dead. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
It’s ok to grieve © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Justin Veenema on Unsplash
What happened? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
What happened? Coroner’s report: © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash
What happened? Coroner’s report: Death by extreme buzzword trauma. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash
But It’s just managed hosting! But it’s just CGI-BIN! But it’s just APIs! But it’s just like PHP! But it’s just like xinetd! BUT BUT BUT THE SERVERS! © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash
But the security is worse! But the security is different! But the cost is higher! It’s too easy! The name is horrible! BUT BUT BUT THE SERVERS! © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash
So let us pay our respects © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash
By going back to the start © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
At first there was Amazon S3 © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
At first there was Amazon S3* © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
At first there was Amazon S3* *OK so Amazon SQS was the first service announced, S3 was the first to GA. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
I have a bucket Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. 2006-2014
Objects can go in Object Object Object Object Object Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Object Object Object Object Object Object © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. 2006-2014
But then…. Object Object Object Object Object Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Object Object Object Object Object Object © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. 2006-2014
But then what happens from here? Object Object Object Object Object Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Object Object Object Object Object Object © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. 2006-2014 ?
Workflow for S3 stored objects 2006-2014 There were two main ways of working with data in S3 in this time: • Performing List calls, acting. Client • Parallel client calls to ”notify” some system that objects were stored, polling that system, acting. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Bucket with objects Amazon Simple Queue Service Amazon EC2 Instances
Workflow for S3 stored objects 2006-2014 There were two main ways of working with data in S3 in this time: • Performing List calls, acting. Client • Parallel client calls to ”notify” some system that objects were stored, polling that system, acting. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. This wasBucket quite with a bit of objects Amazon EC2 Instances complexity Amazon Simple Queue Service
Customers wanted this to be easier Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. 2006-2014 ?
In 2013 AWS Announced Amazon Kinesis Client Client Client Client Amazon Kinesis Client Client Client https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/11/14/introducing-amazon-kinesis/ © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
In 2013 AWS Announced Amazon Kinesis Client Client Client Client Amazon Kinesis Client Client Client ? https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/11/14/introducing-amazon-kinesis/ © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
In 2013 AWS Announced Amazon Kinesis Client Amazon DynamoDB for KCL Checkpoints Client Client Client Amazon Kinesis Client Amazon EC2 Instances running the Kinesis Client Library Client Client https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/11/14/introducing-amazon-kinesis/ © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
In 2013 AWS Announced Amazon Kinesis Client Amazon DynamoDB for KCL Checkpoints Client This was quite a bit of complexity Client Client Amazon Kinesis Client Amazon EC2 Instances running the Kinesis Client Library Client Client https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/11/14/introducing-amazon-kinesis/ © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
And so in November of 2014 © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html
And so in November of 2014 © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html
And so in November of 2014 © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html
Well where did #serverless come from? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
July 19, 2010. – Techcrunch article about PiCloud © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/picloud-launches-serverless-computing-platform-to-the-public/
July 19, 2010. – Techcrunch article about PiCloud In 2013 Dropbox acquires PiCloud, at that point branded as a “supercomputing” startup. https://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox-piclou/ There are no mentions of #serverless © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/picloud-launches-serverless-computing-platform-to-the-public/
So that brings us back to… © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon S3 + AWS Lambda Object Object Object Object Object Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Object Object Object Object Object Object © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon Kinesis + AWS Lambda Client Client Client Client Client Client Client © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon Kinesis
Alexa, let’s change the world. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2015/06/alexa-skills-kit.html
Alexa, let’s change the world. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2015/06/alexa-skills-kit.html
Making all of this possible … © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Lambda API API provided by the Lambda service SDK clients
Lambda API API provided by the Lambda service client = boto3.client(“lambda”) Used by all other services that SDK clients invoke Lambda across all models … 1. Lambda directly invoked via invoke API response = client.invoke( Supports sync and async FunctionName=“myFunction” InvocationType=“Event”|”RequestResponse” Lambda Can pass any event payload Payload=“json_payload” function structure you want ) Client included in every SDK © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The Lambda API provides the model for event driven applications the same way S3’s API did for storage. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
And then Amazon API Gateway in July 2015 Amazon API Gateway © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon API Gateway + AWS Lambda Client Client Client Client Client Amazon API Gateway Client Client © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
APIs are the front door of microservices © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by christian koch on Unsplash
© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon S3 at launch: © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon S3 today: © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
APIs power all of these: iPhone ~11 years Amazon Prime ~14 years *Ages might be slightly off iPad ~9 years Netflix Streaming ~12 years Tesla Model S ~7 years Airbnb ~11 years Apple Watch ~5 years Uber ~10 years Echo ~5 years Square ~10 years Illumina DNA Sequencer ~5 years Slack ~6 years
Some people think that serverless is just for APIs! © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
But it’s not. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
But it’s not. TOP 10 INVOKE SERVICES BY GB-S, 4 WEEK AVERAGE, RANDOM 4 WEEK SAMPLE DynamoDB CloudWatch Logs APIGateway CloudWatch Events S3 SQS LambdaAPISync Kinesis SNS © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. LambdaAPI-ASync
OK, but back to Serverless plz © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Serverless == Faas? At some point Serverless start just being equated with FaaS. • • • • • No AWS announcement in 2015 called Lambda or API Gateway ”Serverless” AWS re:Invent 2015 featured talks with the word serverless in the title specific to Lambda Nov 2015 Techcrunch: “AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications A Reality” Feb 2016 IBM announces OpenWhisk, an open source serverless FaaS May 2016 - first Serverless Conf in NYC, ~13 months after the GA of AWS Lambda © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless == Faas? And then the space grew • Nov 2016 – Azure Functions GA • Dec 2016 – OpenFaaS launch • Oct 2017 – Oracle FN Project release • Aug 2018 – Google Cloud Functions GA © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless abuse But then, everything became serverless.. • • • • • • managed container offerings PaaS-like services storage services messaging services serverless the flamethrower! (Spaceballs joke) etc, etc, etc By late 2017/early 2018 the term started getting pretty stretched © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Some of us fought in vain to keep the term “pure” © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Andrew Yardley on Unsplash
But our enemies were numerous.. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash
So does the word Serverless even matter? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Is Serverless really just a spectrum? In a November 1st 2017 post on the A Cloud Guru blog, AWS Community Hero Ben Kehoe wrote about the “spectrum” of serverless: • Service-full + ephemeral compute • Tighter correspondence between resources used and resources billed • Smaller and more abstracted control plane https://bit.ly/2BBy4L5 © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. @ben11kehoe
The concept of the spectrum made a lot of sense Self managed FaaS © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS Fargate AWS Lambda AWS AppSync
The concept of the spectrum made a lot of sense Self managed FaaS AWS Fargate AWS Lambda AWS AppSync You can measure across: cost, complexity, operational burden, flexibility, portability, etc © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The concept of the spectrum made a lot of sense Biased opinion is that gravity is dragging the industry Self managed FaaS AWS Fargate AWS Lambda AWS AppSync this way à You can measure across: cost, complexity, operational burden, flexibility, portability, etc © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Then the folks from UC Berkeley weighed in (again) © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Then the folks from UC Berkeley weighed in (again) © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
So does the word Serverless even matter? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
no. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless is Dead What we should instead be focusing on is what we’re seeing to be the new way of doing modern application development • • • Greatly reduced operational burden Tighter alignment to costs w/ usage Developers can/could/should be able to do almost anything • • • understated warning to Ops/DevOps/SRE/-ish folks Opinionated platforms that allow for multiple use-cases Opinionated platforms that bake in true best of breed practices, security, scale, performance, cost aspects for you © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
What matters: © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Greater agility Less overhead What matters: Better focus Increased scale More flexibility Pay for value © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
A promise to ourselves © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
A promise to ourselves We’ll focus on the problems and solutions and not the buzzword! Don’t feed the trolls! Ignore the FUD! © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless is Dead! Long live Serverless! © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
Hope to see you all at the next “Modern application development using managed services that provide opinionated event-driven interfaces” Days © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
About me: Chris Munns - munns@amazon.com, @chrismunns • Principal Developer Advocate - Serverless • New Yorker • Previously: • AWS Business Development Manager – DevOps, July ’15 - Feb ‘17 • AWS Solutions Architect Nov, 2011- Dec 2014 • Formerly on operations teams @Etsy and @Meetup • Little time at a hedge fund, Xerox and a few other startups • Rochester Institute of Technology: Applied Networking and Systems Administration ’05 • Internet infrastructure geek © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Chris Munns munns@amazon.com @chrismunns © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://www.flickr.com/photos/theredproject/3302110152/
? © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/202872717/
Long live Serverless! Since the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014 the industry has battled around what the word “serverless” has meant. I say, in 2019 who cares? In this talk we’ll cut past the hype and talk about the realities of what this technology space means, how it’s changing how companies build and operate technology, and how you can properly understand the value it brings to the table.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
AWS Serverless landing page containing links to tons of relevant resources and places to learn more
for free. You
can too.