When speaking about serverless on AWS, most people think about AWS Lambda. But there's more than than. AWS provides a set of fully managed services that you can use to build and run serverless applications. Serverless applications don’t require provisioning, maintaining, and administering servers for backend components such as compute, databases, storage, stream processing, message queuing, and more. You also no longer need to worry about ensuring application fault tolerance and availability. Instead, AWS handles all of these capabilities for you. This allows you to focus on product innovation while enjoying faster time-to-market.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Vladimir Simek, Sr. Solutions Architect @ AWS
19th September 2019
AWS User Group Slovakia
Serverless on AWS:
Architectural Patterns
and Best Practices

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Evolution of computing

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Let’s take a look at the evolution of computing
Physical Servers
in Datacenters
Virtual Servers
in Datacenters
a
Virtual Servers
in the Cloud

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Each progressive step was better
Physical Servers
in Datacenters
Virtual Servers
in Datacenters
a
Virtual Servers
in the Cloud
• Higher utilization
• Faster provisioning speed
• Improved uptime
• Disaster recovery
• Hardware independence
• Trade CAPEX for OPEX
• More scale
• Elastic resources
• Faster speed and agility
• Reduced maintenance
• Better availability and
fault tolerance
• Better Automation

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
But there are still limitations
Physical Servers
in Datacenters
Virtual Servers
in Datacenters
a
Virtual Servers
in the Cloud
• Higher utilization
• Faster provisioning speed
• Improved uptime
• Disaster recovery
• Hardware independence
• Trade CAPEX for OPEX
• More scale
• Elastic resources
• Faster speed and agility
• Reduced maintenance
• Better availability and
fault tolerance
• Better Automation
• Still need to administer
virtual servers
• Still need to manage
capacity and utilization
• Still need to size workloads
• Still need to manage
availability, fault tolerance
• Still expensive to run
intermittent jobs

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The Next Step of Evolution -
Serverless

7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless means …

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless means…
No servers to provision
or manage
Scales with usage
Never pay for idle Availability and fault
tolerance built in

9. No server is easier to manage than
"no server.”
Werner Vogels—Amazon CTO

10. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless means:

11. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless means:
Greater agility
Less overhead
Better focus
Increased scale
More flexibility
Faster time to market

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless applications
Services (anything)
Changes in
data state
Requests to
endpoints
Changes in
resource state
Event source Function
Node.js
Python
Java
C#
Go
Ruby
BYOR (Bring your own runtime)

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Handler() function
Function to be executed
upon invocation
Event object
Data sent during
Lambda Function
Invocation
Context object
Methods available to
interact with runtime
information (request ID,
log group, etc.)
public String handleRequest(Book book, Context context) {
saveBook(book);
return book.getName() + " saved!";
}
Anatomy of a Lambda function

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Fine-Grained Pricing
Buy compute time in 100ms
increments
Low request charge
No hourly, daily, or monthly
minimums
No per-device fees
Never pay for idle
Free Tier
1M requests and 400,000 GB-s of compute.
Every month, every customer.

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS Lambda release history
2015 2016 2017 2018
?
*As of October 2018, does not include region launches

17. Lambda permissions model
Fine grained security controls for both
execution and invocation:
Execution policies:
• Define what AWS resources/API calls can this
function access via IAM
• Used in streaming invocations
• E.g. “Lambda function A can read from
DynamoDB table users”
Function policies:
• Used for sync and async invocations
• E.g. “Actions on bucket X can invoke Lambda
function Z"
• Resource policies allow for cross account
access

18. Lambda execution models
Synchronous
(push)
Asynchronous
(event)
Poll-based
Amazon
API Gateway
AWS Lambda
function
Amazon
DynamoDBAmazon
SNS
/order
AWS Lambda
function
Amazon
S3
reqs
Amazon
Kinesis
changes
AWS Lambda
service
function

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Common Lambda use cases
Web
Applications
• Static
websites
• Complex web
apps
• Packages for
Flask and
Express
Data
Processing
• Real time
• MapReduce
• Batch
Chatbots
• Powering
chatbot logic
Backends
• Apps &
services
• Mobile
• IoT
</></>
Amazon
Alexa
• Powering
voice-enabled
apps
• Alexa Skills
Kit
IT
Automation
• Policy engines
• Extending
AWS services
• Infrastructure
management

20. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

21. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Create a unified
API frontend for
multiple micro-
services
Authenticate and
authorize
requests to a
backend
DDoS protection
and throttling for
your backend
Throttle, meter,
and monetize API
usage by 3rd
party developers
Amazon API Gateway

22. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
API Gateway integrations
Internet
Mobile Apps
Websites
Services
AWS Lambda
functions
AWS
API Gateway
Cache
Endpoints on
Amazon EC2
Amazon
CloudWatch
Monitoring
Amazon
CloudFront
Any other AWS
service
YOUR VPC
Endpoints in
Your VPC
Regional API Endpoints
All publicly
accessible endpoints
AWS Lambda
functions

23. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Demo – Lambda function(s)

24. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Lambda Best Practices
• Minimize package size to necessities
• Use Environment Variables to modify operational
behavior
• Self-contain dependencies in your function package
• Delete large unused functions (75GB limit)
• Leverage “Max Memory Used” to right-size your
functions

25. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tweak your function’s computer power
Lambda exposes only a memory control, with the % of CPU
core and network capacity allocated to a function
proportionally
Is your code CPU, Network or memory-bound? If so, it could be cheaper
to choose more memory.

26. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Smart resource allocation
Match resource allocation (up to 3 GB!) to logic
Stats for Lambda function that calculates 1.000 times all prime numbers
<= 1.000.000
128 MB 11.722965sec $0.024628
256 MB 6.678945sec $0.028035
512 MB 3.194954sec $0.026830
1024 MB 1.465984sec $0.024638
Green==Best Red==Worst

27. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Smart resource allocation
Match resource allocation (up to 3 GB!) to logic
Stats for Lambda function that calculates 1.000 times all prime numbers
<= 1.000.000
128 MB 11.722965sec $0.024628
256 MB 6.678945sec $0.028035
512 MB 3.194954sec $0.026830
1024 MB 1.465984sec $0.024638
Green==Best Red==Worst
+$0.00001-10.256981sec

28. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Best Practice: Keep orchestration out of code.

29. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Keep orchestration out of code.
STARTJOB
JOB#XSTARTED
HTTPPOST
HTTPPOST
AREWETHEREYET?
NOPE!
WE’REDONE!
ZzZz
OR
time.sleep(10)

30. AWS Step Functions
“Serverless” workflow management with
zero administration
• Makes it easy to coordinate the
components of distributed applications
and microservices using visual workflows
• Automatically triggers and tracks each
step, and retries when there are errors,
so your application executes in order and
as expected
• Logs the state of each step, so when
things do go wrong, you can diagnose
and debug problems quickly
Task
Choice
Failure capture
Parallel Tasks

31. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/499531891
Best Practice: Monitor!

32. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Metrics and logging are a universal right
CloudWatch Metrics:
• 7 Built in metrics for Lambda
• Invocation Count, Invocation duration, Invocation
errors, Throttled Invocation, Iterator Age, DLQ
Errors, Concurrency
• Can call “put-metric-data” from your function code
for custom metrics
• 7 Built in metrics for API-Gateway
• API Calls Count, Latency, 4XXs, 5XXs, Integration
Latency, Cache Hit Count, Cache Miss Count
• Error and Cache metrics support averages and
percentiles

33. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

34. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
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();

35. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
X-Ray Trace Example

36. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Best Practice: Leverage other Serverless services
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
DynamoDB
AWS IoT
Amazon
EMR
Amazon
ElastiCache
Amazon
RDS
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon ES
Managed Serverless
Amazon EC2
Microsoft SQL
Server
“On EC2”
Amazon
Cognito
Amazon
CloudWatch

37. Pattern 1: Serverless Web Apps

38. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Web application
Data stored in
Amazon
DynamoDB
Dynamic content
in AWS Lambda
Amazon API
Gateway
Browser
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon S3
Amazon Cognito

39. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon API
Gateway AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
S3
Amazon
CloudFront
• Bucket Policies
• ACLs
• OAI
• Geo-Restriction
• Signed Cookies
• Signed URLs
• DDOS Protection
IAM
AuthZ
IAM
Serverless web app security
• Throttling
• Caching
• Usage Plans
• ACM
Browser
Amazon Cognito

40. Demo – Wild Rydes

41. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Wild Rydes Architecture

42. Pattern 2: Serverless Data Lake

43. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Serverless Data Lake Characteristics
• Collect/Store/Process/Consume and Analyze all
organizational data
• Structured/Semi-Structured/Unstructured data
• AI/ML and BI/Analytical use cases
• Fast automated ingestion
• Schema on Read
• Complementary to EDW
• Decoupled Compute and Storage

44. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS Serverless Data Lake
S3
Bucket(s)
Key
Management
Service
Amazon
Athena
AWS
CloudTrail
Amazon
Cognito
AWS IAM
Amazon
Kinesis
Streams
Amazon
Kinesis
Firehose
Amazon ES
Amazon
QuickSight
AWS Glue
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Macie
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS IAM
Amazon
Redshift
Spectrum
AWS
Direct
Connect
Ingest
Catalog & Search
Security & Auditing
API/UI
Analytics & Processing
AWS Glue
AWS
Lambda

45. Pattern 3: Stream Processing

46. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Stream processing characteristics
• High ingest rate
• Near real-time processing (low latency from ingest to
process)
• Spiky traffic (lots of devices with intermittent network
connections)
• Message durability
• Message ordering

47. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Streaming data ingestion
Amazon CloudWatch:
Delivery metrics
Amazon S3:
Buffered files
Kinesis
Agent
Record
Producers Amazon Redshift:
Table loads
Amazon Elasticsearch Service:
Domain loads
Amazon S3:
Source record backup
AWS Lambda:
Transformations &
enrichment
Amazon DynamoDB:
Lookup tables
Raw records
Lookup
Transformed records
Transformed recordsRaw records
Amazon Kinesis Firehose:
Delivery stream

48. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Sensor data collection
IoT
rules
IoT
actions
MQTT
Amazon S3:
Raw records
Amazon Kinesis Firehose:
Delivery stream
Amazon S3:
Batched records
Amazon Kinesis Streams:
Real-time stream
AWS IoT:
Data collection
IoT Sensors
Real-time analytics
applications

49. Pattern 4: Operations Automation

50. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Automation characteristics
• Periodic jobs
• Event triggered workflows
• Enforce security policies
• Audit and notification
• Respond to alarms
• Extend AWS functionality
… All while being Highly Available, Scalable and Auditable

51. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Image recognition and processing
Web App
Amazon DynamoDB:
Image meta-data & tags
Amazon Cognito:
User authentication
Amazon S3:
Image uploads
AWS Step Functions:
Workflow orchestration
Start state machine execution
1
Extract image meta-data
2
Amazon Rekognition:
Object detection
Invoke Amazon Rekognition
Generate image thumbnail
3
3Store meta-data and tags
4
https://github.com/awslabs/lambda-refarch-imagerecognition

52. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Enforce security policies
RDP from
0.0.0.0/0
RDP from
0.0.0.0/0
CloudWatch Event Bus in
another AWS Account
New Security Group ingress rule Amazon CloudWatch Events:
Rule
AWS Lambda:
Remediate and alert
AWS SNS:
Email alert
Ingress rule deleted

53. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Where do you ...
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5749192025/

54. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Start with a framework
AWS
Chalice
AWS Amplify
AWS
SAM
AWS: Third-party:
Serverless
Framework

55. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)
AWS CloudFormation extension optimized for
serverless
New serverless resource types: functions, APIs,
and tables
Supports anything AWS CloudFormation supports
Open specification (Apache 2.0)
https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/sam

56. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS SAM Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
CLI tool for local development, debugging, testing,
deploying, and monitoring of serverless applications
Supports API Gateway “proxy-style” and Lambda service
API testing
Response object and function logs available on your local
machine
Uses open source docker-lambda images to mimic Lambda’s
execution environment such as timeout, memory limits,
runtimes
Can tail production logs from CloudWatch logs
https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/sam

57. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
AWS Cloud9

58. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
processes 4,000 requests
per second
ingests, analyzes and
stores 17+ petabytes of
data per season
processes half a trillion
validations of stock
trades daily
executes 16 million
requests a month
processes tens of
billions of data
points monthly
SERVERLESS AT SCALE IS THE NEW NORM
API traffic to register and license
more than 47 million driver
records in Great Britain,

59. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
SERVERLESS CUSTOMERS

60. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Further Resources
AWS Serverless https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
AWS SAM https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-
application-model
AWS SAM CLI (Beta) https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-
cli
Wild Rydes with Unicorns (serverless web app)
https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/build-
serverless-web-app-lambda-apigateway-s3-dynamodb-
cognito/

61. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Q & A

62. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
We’re hiring – AWS in CEE
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/aws-central-eastern-europe

63. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank you
vladsim@amazon.com