An introduction to serverless computing on AWS Lambda. Review of why you'd what to go serverless, what technologies are supported and the basics of the service on AWS. A demo walks through setting up a Lambda function using .NET Core, C# and Visual Studio. Taken from a talk given at Atlanta Code Camp 2019.

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Going Serverless
with AWS Lambda

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About Me
• Principal Consultant with Improving Atlanta
• Contributing Writer to Business2Community
& The Enterprisers Project
• 20 Years Doing Application Development
• Worked with Clients in AWS & Azure Clouds
• Certified AWS Developer Associate
• Drove Amazon Partnership Effort at
Improving

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Agenda
What is Serverless
& Why Should We
Use It
AWS Lambda How Companies
are Using Lambda
to Change
Business
Setting Up a
Lambda Function
Using .NET Core, C#
and Visual Studio

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What is Serverless?
NEW ERA OF
APPLICATION
DEVELOPMENT IN THE
CLOUD
ALLOWS YOU TO RUN
CODE WITHOUT
PROVISIONING SERVERS
THERE ARE SERVERS
INVOLVED. YOU JUST
AREN’T MANAGING
THEM
EVENT-DRIVEN CLOUD
COMPUTING.
EVENT TRIGGERS CODE
THAT HAS BEEN LOADED
ONTO THE SYSTEM.
BUILDING ON A
FUNCTION BY FUNCTION
BASIS (FAAS)

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Why Serverless?
Pay by the Execution
In AWS, the first 1,000,000 are
free. $.20 per million thereafter.
$0.00001667 GB-second of
compute time per execution
Effortless Scaling
No concern over scaling up or
down infrastructure.
Performance is always optimized.
No Maintenance
The cloud provider handles all
maintenance so no patching, no
licensing,
Cost Matches Usage
Only pay for the compute time
you consume.

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Flavors of Serverless
AWS Lambda
Azure
Functions
Google
Functions
• More extensive language
support (PHP, Typescript, F#,
Powershell)
• Built for hybrid cloud
• Only supports NodeJS & Python
• Slow product development
What really matters is the availability of and consumption of other services to within the cloud provider ecosystem. Being able to execute
functions in response to events is only as useful as what you can actually do within the execution pipeline. This is where the services differ —
their ability to to pass data to backend services, perform calculations, transform data, store results, and quickly retrieve data.
• First mover (November 2014)
• Leader in serverless computing
• Experimental language options
• Built for pure cloud

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AWS Lambda
…
AWS Runs 70% of Serverless
User Base
Industry Leader
Announced at re:Invent
November 2014. Preceded
Azure Functions by 2 Years.
First Mover
32% market share compared to
17% for Azure
AWS Cloud Twice Size of Azure
Alexa product development
driven by internal stakeholders
providing initial demand and
use cases
Innovates and Leads on Functionality

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History of Lambda
NOVEMBER 2014
•Lambda is released to
preview at re:Invent. It was
born from Amazon’s Alexa
personal assistant. Lambda
was the engine built to run it.
APRIL 2015
•Lambda is released to
general availability.
JULY 2015
•AWS console adds blueprints
for easy creation and testing
of Lambda functions.
DECEMBER 2016
•Adds support for C# and .NET
Core.

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1
3
4
5
Node.js
Python
Ruby
Java
Go
C# (.NET Core)
Can download the AWS Toolkit and work directly in
Visual Studio. Setup your Lambda service and push it
up to the cloud without leaving Visual Studio.
2
6
Cold start performance advantage due to
interpreters with lightweight runtimes.
Cold start performance advantage due to
interpreters with lightweight runtimes.
Higher memory footprint and longer execution times
can translate into higher costs.

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Setting Up a Lambda Function
01
03
Handler
A function in your code that AWS Lambda can invoke when
executing your code
exports.myLambdaFunction(Event, context, callback) => {}
02
Runtime
Runtime is the language you will be writing your code in.
Node.js, Python, C#, Java, Ruby, Go
Trigger
Dynamo DB table is updated, triggering Lambda code.
An HTTP request comes into AWS API Gateway triggering Lambda code.
An event fires off on an interval like a cron job from CloudWatch Events

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Using Lambda with Other AWS Services
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Simple Queue
Service
Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Lex
Amazon Alexa
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon Simple Notification
Service
Amazon Simple Email Service
AWS CloudFormation
Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Amazon CloudWatch Events
AWS CodeCommit
AWS Config
Services that Lambda
Reads Events From
Services that Invoke
Lambda Synchronously
Services that Invoke
Lambda Asynchronously

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How Companies are Using Lambda
Netflix Company 2 The Guardian Financial EnginesFinancial EnginesThe GuardianNetflix iRobot

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Netflix
Streaming Media Bohemoth
7 Billion Hours of Video to 50 Million Customers
Across 60 Countries.
Use event-based triggers to help automate the encoding process of
media files, the validation of backup completions and instance
deployments at scale
New abstraction layer that gets above what they’ve used In the
past for more efficiency, cleaner logic for better control of their
systems.
Rules-based self-managing infrastructure

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SWOT
Neil Hunt
Chief Product Officer at Netflix

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iRobot
IoT Vacuum Device Making Pets
Bearable
20 Million iRobots Worldwide Sending Lots of Data.
Gartner forecasts that there will be 20.4 billion
“connected things” in use worldwide by 2020.
Rapid growth necessitated solution to scale more quickly and allow
for more direct control
Uses 25 AWS services to run the Roomba vacuum
Serverless architecture based on AWS IoT and AWS Lambda, iRobot
is able to keep the cost of the cloud platform low, avoid the need
for subscription services, and manage the solution with fewer than
10 people.

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SWOT
iRobot Architecture

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Financial Engines
Computational Engine Used to Automate Investment
Portfolio Management
Serves 9 Million People Holding $1.2 Trillion in Assets
94% savings in hard costs.
Replaced 50 IPO servers running in 21 different environments with
four Lambda endpoints that handle all the traffic.
Near-zero downtime and near-zero performance degradation while
serving 200–300 million IPO requests per month at rates of 60,000
per minute during heaviest traffic, which can reach 10 times
normal traffic

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The Guardian
UK News Provider Runs The Guardian
& The Observer
60K people worldwide receive The Guardian
newspaper. Uses AWS Step Functions for Workflow
Processing
Development team relied on disparate distributed systems to store
customer data. Translation: new customers not receiving their paper
Used step functions to coordinate invocation of Lambda functions. This
makes it easy to orchestrate application and business processes in an
automated, reliable way.

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SWOT
The Guardian Architecture

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Demo
C# with .NET Core using Visual Studio

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SWOT
Install AWS Toolkit in Visual Studio 2017 or 2019 from Manage Extensions

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SWOT
Create a New Project and Search for AWS

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SWOT
Under Configure, Input Project Name, Location, Solution & Solution Name

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SWOT
Select an AWS Blueprint That You Want Your Function to Follow

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aws-lambda-tools-default.json Holds Configuration Information

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function.cs Holds the Function Code to Invoke

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Right Click on Project & Select Publish to AWS
Click on the User Icon to Enter AWS Account Details to Pair Visual Studio
Also Select Region You are Uploading to and the Language Runtime

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Under Advanced, Set the IAM Role, Environmental Variables & Config Settings

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You’ll See It Uploading Your Function to AWS

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After the Successful Upload, You Should See the Function in the AWS Console

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Finally, Test Your Function from Within Visual Studio

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Resources
Going Serverless with AWS Lambda
The companion article I wrote for Business 2 Community.
https://aws.amazon.com/free/
AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio
https://aws.amazon.com/visualstudio/
Deploy Existing .NET Core Web API to AWS Lambda
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/deploy-an-existing-
asp-net-core-web-api-to-aws-lambda/
AWS Free Tier
Try Lambda out yourself on Amazon’s dime.
https://aws.amazon.com/free/
Creating an AWS Lambda Service with C#
https://medium.com/tutorialsxl/creating-aws-lambda-service-
in-c-da14989ae1cb

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Thanks
Email: mark.runyon@improving.com
Twitter: aspprogrammer
LinkedIn: /in/softwarearchitect
http://markrunyon.com
https://improving.com