Serverless Meetup first meeting

1. Meetup info
Luca Bianchi
Serverless User Group - Italy
github.com/aletheia
https://it.linkedin.com/in/lucabianchipavia
@bianchiluca

2. Welcome to the first Serverless On Stage Meetup!
• Born last June as an experiment (honestly after a number of beers..)
• 140 members in few months
• Monthly meetups (?) bi-monthly?
• Thanks to our sponsor that made it possible
Serverless technologies are
• cool
• very fast evolving
• very bad documented

3. The most important thing about Serverless Italy Meetup

4. The most important thing about Serverless Meetup
• Join the discussion online
• Present topics at Serverless On Stage events
• Give contributions and ideas
• Help spreading the word, save the world (from servers)!

5. www.neosperience.com | blog.neosperience.com | info@neosperience.com
November 2015
Serverless 1.x - build services in days, not weeks
Luca Bianchi, Chief Technology Officer @ Neosperience
github.com/aletheia
https://it.linkedin.com/in/lucabianchipavia
@bianchiluca

6. CTO @ Neosperience
Who am I?
Working on a lot of bleeding edge technologies. Passionate developer. Love writing code, not Powerpoints.
The Neosperience Cloud
• Software as a service cloud for Digital Customer Experience processes (couponing, gamification, proximity, etc.)
• Completely built on AWS
• Moved from VMWare, to EC2, to Elastic Beanstalk, to Lambda
• Dozens of micro and nano services
Neosperience
The Digital Customer Experience Company, aims to change the way brands and customers interact with an
approach of a software vendor targeting Digital Customer Experience as the evolution of Marketing automation.

7. ✓ Functions are the unit of development and scaling
✓ No machine, VMs or containers visible in the programming model
✓ Permanent storage lives elsewhere (stateless code)
✓ Scales per request. Users cannot over or under-provision capacity
✓ Never pay for idle
✓ Implicitly fault tolerant
✓ BYOC - Bring Your Own Code
✓ Metrics and logging are an universal right
The Serverless Manifesto

8. The Serverless Framework
• Started less than one year ago (was named JAWS)
• Provides an opinionated view of Serverless technologies
• Fast moving (with a bi-weekly release model)
• Funded by a 3M investment
• Manages service deployments and provisioning
• Vendor independent (in a future release)

9. The Serverless Framework 1.0
• One configuration file for everything
• Auto-provision of resources
• Verbose output
• Supports for micro-services
• Improved plugin management system
• Production ready

10. The Serverless Framework 1.1
• Services deployment rollback
• Allow services without functions
• Functions can run locally
• Supports templates
• Bug Fixes

11. Hello World!
• Install Serverless locally (trust me, it’s better)
npm install serverless —save
• Create a function in NodeJS (also Java and Python are supported)
serverless create —template=aws-nodejs
• Deploy service
serverless deploy
done!

12. DEMO

13. Show me something more real!
• Marketing needs to track leads opening their links
• Standard trackers are “ugly”
• You can pay bit.ly
• …or you can spend a few hours programming
• Show me the code!!
sls-url-shortener

14. Wait a minute.. let’s talk about architecture
• Dependency Injection
• Configuration injected
• Each layer can be tested with a minimal amount of
mocks
• AWS -independent
a layered model adapted for Serverless
Lambda
Response Event
Lambda
Request Event

15. Lambda Response
Event
Lambda Request
Event
handler
Receives Lambda event, handles AWS specific code and is injected with validator
validator
Perform event / input validation, enforcing constraints and rejecting invalid
payloads. Additional permission checks should be implemented here
translator
Converts input data to business logic data, adding and building system consistent
representation. Is injected with logic layer
logic
Implements Business Logic for a specific service. Works on Business Objects,
being an equivalent of MVC Service layer. Is injected with the adapter
adapter
Converts data to a persistence actionable format, does not know about
persistence concrete implementation, builds queries but does not initialize any
connection to persistence. It is injected with repository.
repository
Implements direct API calls to underlying persistence system
AWS
Amazon Web Service persistence layer. It can be either dynamoDB, Redis, S3 or
another microservice

16. DEMO

17. The good..
• Fast time to market (the whole project built in 8h)
• Modularity by design
• Functions can run locally
• Everything is contained and versioned
• Serverless avoids a lot of boilerplate
• Incremental deployments
• Supports CI
• Enables services and infrastructure versioning
• Cost-effective

18. ..the bad..
• Architecture has to be enforced (your code is as good as you)
• Testing is unavoidable, TDD is encouraged
• Every deploy hits the cloud
• Cannot test offline (no matter how you try)
• Avoid Lambda cold start issue
• SLS Documentation is fragmented (now improved with 1.1)
• Not everything is supported by CloudFormation

19. ..the ugly!!
• Removed environment variables from 0.5 (!!)
• Sometimes CloudFormation hangs
• YAML is not for humans (and Serverless does not support JSON anymore)
• You have to be an architect not (only) a developer
• Avoid distributed monoliths
• Avoid “barilotto” experience

20. Overall experience
• Faster time to market compared to standard stacks
• Unopinionated view on microservices, with a small opinionated layer (SLS)
• It makes you a better developer
• Enforces creative solution finding (by opening a set of possibilities)
• Supports CI
• Do not attempt manual deploy
• Really Cost-effective
• Test coverage is a must

21. Thank you
github.com/aletheia
https://it.linkedin.com/in/lucabianchipavia
@bianchiluca
• sls-url-shortener available on Github
• Slides available on slideshare
• Questions?

22. www.neosperience.com | blog.neosperience.com | info@neosperience.com