AWS Lambda allows you to run you code on a Serverless infrastructure, while AWS takes care of all the heavy lifting of Provisioning and utilization, Availability and fault tolerance, Scaling and Operations and management. In this session, we will take few use cases, from common development scenarios, and show how can we AWS Lambda to build smarter and better systems.

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Boaz Ziniman, Technical Evangelist, AWS
@ziniman
AWS Lambda Use & Architecture Patterns
January 2018

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What does Serverless mean?
No servers to provision or
manage
Scale with your usage
Built in availability and
fault-tolerance
Never pay for idle/unused
capacity

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Serverless functions
• Functions are the unit of deployment and scale
• This scales per request!
• Skip the boring parts, skip the hard parts

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How it works?

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Using AWS Lambda
Bring your own code
• Node.js, Java, Python, C#,
Go
• Bring your own libraries
(even native ones)
Simple resource model
• Select power rating from
128 MB to 3 GB
• CPU and network
allocated proportionately
Flexible use
• Synchronous or
asynchronous
• Integrated with other
AWS services
Flexible authorization
• Securely grant access to
resources and VPCs
• Fine-grained control for
invoking your functions

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Using AWS Lambda
Authoring functions
• WYSIWYG editor or
upload packaged .zip
• Third-party plugins
(Eclipse, Visual Studio)
Monitoring and logging
• Metrics for requests,
errors, and throttles
• Built-in logs to Amazon
CloudWatch Logs
Programming model
• Use processes, threads,
/tmp, sockets normally
• AWS SDK built in (Python
and Node.js)
Stateless
• Persist data using
external storage
• No affinity or access to
underlying infrastructure

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Serverless applications
FUNCTION SERVICES (ANYTHING)
Changes in
data state
Requests to
endpoints
Changes in
resource state
Node
Python
Java
C#
Go
EVENT SOURCE

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Example event sources
Data stores Endpoints
Configuration repositories Event/message sources
Amazon S3 Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
Cognito
Amazon IoT AWS Step
Functions
Amazon
Alexa
AWS
CloudTrail
AWS
CodeCommit
Amazon
CloudWatch
Amazon SES Amazon SNS Cron events
Amazon
API Gateway
AWS
Cloudformation
…and more!

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Lambda Use Cases

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#1: 3-Tier Web Application

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3-Tier web application
Data stored in
Amazon
DynamoDB
Dynamic content
in AWS Lambda
Amazon API
Gateway
Browser
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon
S3
Browser
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon
S3
Amazon API
Gateway
Dynamic content in
AWS Lambda
Data store in Amazon
DynamoDB

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Amazon API
Gateway AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
S3
Amazon
CloudFront
• Bucket Policies
• ACLs
• OAI
• Geo-Restriction
• Signed Cookies
• Signed URLs
• DDOS
AuthZ
IAM
Serverless web app security
• Throttling
• Caching
• Usage Plans
Browser
IAM

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Amazon API
Gateway AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
S3
Amazon
CloudFront
• Bucket Policies
• ACLs
• OAI
• Geo-Restriction
• Signed Cookies
• Signed URLs
• DDOS
AuthZ
Serverless web app security
• Throttling
• Caching
• Usage Plans
Browser
Amazon
CloudFront
• HTTPS
• Disable Host
Header Forwarding
AWS WAF
IAMIAM

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Amazon API
Gateway
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
S3
Amazon
CloudFront
• Access Logs in S3
Bucket• Access Logs in S3 Bucket
• CloudWatch Metrics-
https://aws.amazon.com/
cloudfront/reporting/
Serverless web app monitoring
AWS WAF
• WebACL Testing
• Total Requests
• Allowed/Blocked
Requests by ACL
logslogs
• Invocations
• Invocation Errors
• Duration
• Throttled
Invocations
• Latency
• Throughput
• Throttled Reqs
• Latency
• Count
• Cache Hit/Miss
• 4XX/5XX Errors
Streams
AWS
CloudTrail
Browser
Custom CloudWatch
Metrics & Alarms

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Serverless web app lifecycle management
• AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model) - blog
AWS
Lambda
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS
CloudFormation
Amazon
S3
Amazon
DynamoDB
Package &
Deploy
Code/Packages/Swagger
Serverless
Template
Serverless
Template
w/ CodeUri
package deploy
CI/CD Tools

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http://bit.ly/ServerlessShop
https://github.com/patrick-michelberger/serverless-shop

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#2: automation

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Automation characteristics
• Respond to alarms or events
• Periodic jobs
• Auditing and Notification
• Extend AWS functionality

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AWS Lambda:
Resize Images
Users upload photos
S3:
Source Bucket
S3:
Destination Bucket
Triggered on
PUTs
Automation: image thumbnail creation from S3
https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing

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#3: IoT

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IoT – Click to Website
MQTT
AWS
IoT
Static S3
Site
Read
SMS
Amazon
CloudFront
Read/
Write

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MQTT
AWS
IoT
Static S3
Site
Read
SMS
Amazon
CloudFront
Read/
Write
IoT – Click to Website

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IoT – Click to Website
MQTT
AWS
IoT
Static S3
Site
Read
SMS
Amazon
CloudFront
Read/
Write

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http://bit.ly/OneClickIoT

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A few Lambda specific best practices
Lambda is stateless à architect accordingly!
• Assume no affinity with underlying compute infrastructure
• Local filesystem and child processes may not extend beyond
the lifetime of the Lambda request

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Lambda considerations and best practices
• Can your Lambda functions
survive the cold?
• Instantiate AWS clients and
database clients outside the scope
of the handler to take advantage
of connection re-use.
• Schedule with CloudWatch Events
for warmth
• ENIs for VPC support are attached
during cold start
import sys
import logging
import rds_config
import pymysql
rds_host = "rds-instance"
db_name =
rds_config.db_name
try:
conn = pymysql.connect(
except:
logger.error("ERROR:
def handler(event, context):
with conn.cursor() as cur:
Executes during
cold start
Executes with
each invocation

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Lambda considerations and best practices
How about a file system?
• Don’t forget about /tmp
(512 MB of scratch space)
exports.ffmpeg = function(event,context)
{
new ffmpeg('./thumb.MP4', function (err,
video)
{
if (!err) {
video.fnExtractFrameToJPG('/tmp’)
function (error, files) { … }
…
if (!error)
console.log(files);
context.done();
...

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Other resources
• AWS documentation:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html
• Tons of compute blog posts:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/category/aws-lambda/
• Lambda reference architecture:
https://github.com/awslabs/lambda-refarch-webapp
• Hello Retail:
https://github.com/Nordstrom/hello-retail
• Serverless beyond Functions – Serverless using IoT:
https://medium.com/cloud-academy-inc/serverless-beyond-
functions-cd81ee4c6b8d

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Thanks!
Boaz Ziniman, Technical Evangelist, AWS
@ziniman
boazz@amazon.com