AWS Lambda allows you to run your 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 we can use AWS Lambda to build smarter and better systems.

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Boaz Ziniman, Technical Evangelist, AWS
@ziniman
Serverless Use Cases with AWS Lambda
IsraelCloud Meetup – October 2017

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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 runs on 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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Serverless applications
FUNCTION SERVICES (ANYTHING)
Changes in
data state
Requests to
endpoints
Changes in
resource state
Node
Python
Java
C#
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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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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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: stream processing

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Characteristics of stream processing
• 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

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Data
Generators
Amazon Kinesis:
Stream
Lambda:
Stream Processor
S3:
Final Aggregated Output
Lambda:
Periodic Dump to S3
CloudWatch Events:
Trigger every 5 minutes
S3:
Intermediate Aggregated
Data
Lambda:
Scheduled Dispatcher
KPL:
Producer
Serverless stream processing architecture

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Data
Generators
Fan-out pattern
• Trade higher throughput & lower latency vs. strict message ordering
Amazon Kinesis:
Stream
Lambda:
Dispatcher
KPL:
Producer Lambda:
Processors
Increase throughput, reduce processing latency

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#3: automation

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

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AWS Lambda:
Update Route53
Amazon CloudWatch Events:
Rule Triggered
Amazon EC2 Instance
State Changes
Amazon DynamoDB:
EC2 Instance Properties
Amazon Route53:
Private Hosted Zone
Tag:
CNAME = ‘xyz.example.com’
xyz.example.com A 10.2.0.134
Automation: dynamic DNS for EC2 instances

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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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#4: 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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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