My slides on AWS Lambda from the Portsmouth Dev Meetup on 19th Oct 2016.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Ian Massingham
Technical Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
Getting Started with AWS Lambda
and the Serverless Cloud

2. What is serverless computing?
• VMs
• Machine as the unit of scale
• Abstracts the hardware
• Containers
• Application as the unit of scale
• Abstracts the OS
• Serverless
• Functions as the unit of scale
• Abstracts the language runtime
EC2
ECS
AWS Lambda

3. How do I choose?
• VMs
• “I want to configure machines,
storage, networking, and my OS”
• Containers
• “I want to run servers, configure
applications, and control scaling”
• Serverless
• “Run my code when it’s needed”
EC2
ECS
AWS Lambda

4. Microservices and AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda + Amazon API Gateway is the
easiest way to create microservices
• Event handlers one function per event type
• Serverless back ends one function per API / path
• Data processing one function per data type

5. Agenda
Overview
Use cases
Recent launches and best practices
Demo
Q & A

6. AWS Lambda: Serverless computing
Run code without servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume. Be happy.
Triggered by events or called from APIs:
• PUT to an Amazon S3 bucket
• Updates to Amazon DynamoDB table
• Call to an Amazon API Gateway endpoint
• Mobile app back-end call
• And many more…
Makes it easy to:
• Perform real-time data processing
• Build scalable back-end services
• Glue and choreograph systems

7. Continuous scalingNo servers to
manage
Never pay for idle –
no cold servers
(only happy
accountants)
Benefits of AWS Lambda

8. Pay-per request
• Buy compute time in
100 ms increments
• Low request charge
• No hourly, daily, or
monthly minimums
• No per-device fees
Never pay for idle!
Free Tier
1 million requests and 400,000 GBs of
compute every month, every customer

9. Using AWS Lambda
Bring your own code
• Node.js, Java, Python
• Bring your own libraries (even
native ones)
Simple resource model
• Select power rating from 128
MB to 1.5 GB
• CPU and network allocated
proportionately
• Reports actual usage
Flexible authorization
• Securely grant access to
resources, including VPCs
• Fine-grained control over
who can call your functions
Flexible use
• Call or send events
• Integrated with other AWS
services
• Build whole serverless
ecosystems

10. Using AWS Lambda
Programming model
• AWS SDK built in (Python
and Node.js)
• Lambda is the front end
• Use processes, threads, /
tmp, sockets normally
Stateless
• Persist data using Amazon
DynamoDB, S3, or
ElastiCache
• No affinity to infrastructure
(can’t “log in to the box”)
Authoring functions
• Author directly using the
console WYSIWYG editor
• Package code as a .zip and
upload to Lambda or S3
• Plugins for Eclipse and Visual
Studio
• Command line tools
Monitoring and logging
• Built-in metrics for requests,
errors, latency, and throttles
• Built-in logs in Amazon
CloudWatch Logs

11. But what *is* AWS Lambda?
Linux containers as an implementation, not a programming
or deployment abstraction
• Process and network isolation, cgroups, seccomp, …
The world’s biggest bin-packing algorithm
• High speed, highly distributed work routing and placement
Predictive capacity management
• Purpose-built, massively scaled language runtime delivery
service
Swagger interpreter (API Gateway)

12. Amazon API Gateway: Serverless APIs
Internet
Mobile apps
Websites
Services
AWS Lambda
functions
AWS
API Gateway
cache
Endpoints on
Amazon EC2
Any other publicly
accessible endpointAmazon
CloudWatch
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon
API Gateway

13. Benefits of Amazon API Gateway
Create a unified API
front end for multiple
microservices
DDoS protection
and throttling for
back-end systems
Authenticate and
authorize requests

14. Use cases

15. Lambda: Use cases
Serverless app
ecosystems
Data processing Back ends

16. §
Example: Amazon S3 bucket triggers
Amazon S3 bucket events
Original object
Compressed object
1
2
3
AWS Lambda

17. Why functions are the right answer
Amazon
DynamoDB
Call Events
Customize
API

18. Use case: Automatically scalable back ends
1. AWS Mobile SDK + Amazon Cognito for mobile app
Or AWS IoT for devices
2. AWS Lambda runs the code
3. Amazon API Gateway (if you want your own endpoint)
4. Amazon DynamoDB holds the data
AWS Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB

19. Use case: New app ecosystems:
Alexa apps + Slack = serverless bots!
Alexa, tell Slack to
send, “I’m giving the
demo now.”
Message retrieval through scheduled
polling
Kevin says,
“Break a leg!”
Message upload
(via Slack API)
Team
(channel users)
Slack

20. Recent launches and
best practices

21. re:Invent 2015
• Python
• Scheduled functions
• Longer running times (5 min.)
• Versioning
Recent launches
2016
• Higher code storage limits (from
5 GB to 75 GB per region)
• VPC
• New regions!
• Node.js 4.3.2
• Swagger API import
• 1-minute schedules
New!

22. Function schedules: The how-to guide
✓ How can I keep a function warm (no cold starts)?
Schedule it!
✓ How can I poll a queue (like SQS)?
Schedule a function to read the queue.
✓ How can I get more timers?
Have one scheduled function async invoke other functions.
✓ How can I get granularity finer than 1 minute?
Run a background timer in your scheduled function.

23. Function versioning: The how-to guide
✓ How can I get mutable configuration info?
Read it (e.g. from DynamoDB) during function initialization.
Wrap your config in a function and call it from your published code.
✓ How do I “roll back” in AWS Lambda?
Using aliases, just switch what the alias points to.
(As a collection, add API Gateway stages or CloudFormation.)
✓ How do I do blue/green deployments?
AWS Lambda handles fleet deployments, but if you want to shape traffic,
put a second “traffic cop” function in front.
✓ How can I lock a client/device onto an old version?
Point them directly to that version’s ARN.

24. AWS Lambda VPC basics
• All Lambda functions run in a VPC, all the time
• You never need to “turn on” security – it’s always on
• You can also grant Lambda functions access to resources in your own VPC
• How: Add VPC subnet IDs and security group IDs to the function config
• Typical uses: RDB, ElastiCache, private EC2 endpoints
• Allows access to peered VPCs, VPN endpoints, and private S3 endpoints
• Functions configured for VPC access lose internet access…
• unless you have managed NAT or a NAT instance in the VPC
• …Even if you have “Auto-assign Public IP” enabled
• …Even if you have an internet gateway set up in your VPC
• …Even if your security group allows all outbound traffic

25. AWS Lambda VPC feature: Best practices
✓ VPC is optional – don’t turn in on unless you need it.
✓ The ENIs used by Lambda’s VPC feature count against
your quota.
Ensure you have enough to match your peak concurrency levels
(we’ll consolidate where we can).
DO NOT delete or rename these ENIs! ☺
✓ Ensure your subnets have enough IPs for those ENIs.
✓ Specify at least one subnet in each Availability Zone
Otherwise, Lambda will obey, but can’t be as fault-tolerant.

26. Demo

27. Serverless web app architecture
1. Amazon S3 for serving static content
2. AWS Lambda for dynamic content
3. Amazon API Gateway for https access
4. Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL data storage
Dynamic content in
AWS Lambda
Data stored in
Amazon
DynamoDB
API GatewayStatic content in
Amazon S3

28. The serverless compute manifesto
Functions are the unit of deployment and scaling.
No machines, VMs, or containers visible in the programming model.
Permanent storage lives elsewhere.
Scales per request. Users cannot over- or under-provision capacity.
Never pay for idle (no cold servers/containers or their costs).
Implicitly fault-tolerant because functions can run anywhere.
BYOC – Bring your own code.
Metrics and logging are a universal right.

29. Join the serverless revolution!

30. Product manager or business
analyst? Check out
aws.amazon.com/lambda for
scenarios and customer stories.
0.

31. Developer? Go to the AWS
Lambda console, create a
function, and run it.
(The first million invokes are on us!)
1.

32. Congrats, you’re a Lambda
function expert! Add an event
source or an HTTP endpoint.
2.

33. Build a mobile, voice, or IoT
back end with a few lines of
code.3.

34. Q & A
Follow AWS Lambda and
Amazon API Gateway!
aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute
aws.amazon.com/lambda
AWS Lambda forum
t: @IanMmmm

35. Follow AWS Lambda and
Amazon API Gateway!
aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute
aws.amazon.com/lambda
AWS Lambda forum
t: @IanMmmm