When DevOps Meets Serverless
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Lightning talk introducing serverless technology, then covering how DevOps is evolving to meet the challenges of the serverless world. - for a deeper look at this topic with more content in slides, see my more recent talk "How Serverless Changes DevOps" Delivered at DDD Southwest, 21 Apr 2018. To see detailed text covering what I said, click the Notes link just below (or download the Powerpoint).
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When DevOps Meets Serverless
- 1. When DevOps Meets Serverless Richard Donkin DevOps Engineer @rdonkin tempohq.net
- 4. FaaSFunction
- 7. Don't Pay For Idle
- 9. DiffOps
- 16. Security
- 19. Someone Else's Problem Don't Pay for Idle DevOps is evolving
- 20. Thank You Richard Donkin DevOps Engineer @rdonkin tempohq.net
Editor's Notes
- DevOps engineer – focusing on serverless, working on fintech project at moment. Talking about serverless and how DevOps is evolving to meet its challenges.
- So what is serverless? Well, a vast amount of security, scalability and managing failover is someone else's problem – Amazon and Microsoft will take care of this with serverless, rather than giving you a virtual server to manage.
- Serverless is like PaaS, only more so – you just deploy app code as stateless functions. The difference is auto scaling and high availability – the cloud provider runs as many servers as you need.
- FaaS = run single stateless function, as many copies as needed - no problem with Wall of Traffic - very good for spiky workloads
- The other part of serverless is BaaS = Azure Blobs, AWS S3, Cosmos DB, DynamoDB, … all run by the cloud provider so you don't have to.
- If you use any of those BaaS services with servers or containers, you are partly serverless! It's very common to do this, to avoid the hassle of running your own object store, database, or whatever – and that's the same logic that drives serverless.
- Most servers are mostly idle, like this guy. A key part of serverless is that you don't pay for idle time. Just pay as you go, for the compute and storage you use. Ref: https://www.slideshare.net/NCore1/unite-2017-going-serverless-gertjan-vanthienen slide 2 - servers are 30% idle, and on AWS it's over 90%.
- So serverless has many benefits for scaling, security and so on. The question is: does this mean Less Ops or No Ops?
- I believe that DevOps is not disappearing, but evolving in response to some of the new challenges as you move into the serverless world, to make sure your app *keeps working* in production.
- Provisioning cloud resources such as storage containers, or access controls, requires tools such as Terraform, and typically a deployment tool like Serverless Framework. Configuration parameters apply in all these cases, and a DevOps mindset helps in keeping them DRY.
- For many cloud resources, "infrastructure as code" is a key part of DevOps - here we're creating a container in Azure Blob Storage using Terraform. Just like app code, this code goes into Git, gets code reviewed, and has automated tests done in CI/CD.
- You still need to detect your app isn't working, or is too slow - so monitoring and logging remain crucial. The complexity of serverless architectures also drives the need for observability, which lets you drill down into really hard bugs in production, by capturing rich data that's easily analysed.
- Each serverless function is an independent unit, acting as a nanoservice, not just a microservice. That's great for scaling, but you now have more to monitor and configure than before.
- DevOps for Serverless means knowing the best way to do operational stuff, based on the details like how Azure storage accounts affect IOPS, or how AWS handles "cold start" of a Lambda function - this stuff really matters to how well your app works in production.
- Secret management means making sure all your passwords and API tokens are properly encrypted. Cloud providers have some great value services here, like AWS Parameter Store, but they still need to be configured.
- Good news - you have no servers to harden! The bad news is you can't deploy security related agents to those non-existent servers. Serverless needs some new tools and approaches here – both vendors and cloud providers are focusing on this.
- Development environments can be very low cost with serverless – everyone can get their own environment. Canary deployments for a percentage of traffic were tricky but are now supported by some cloud providers.
- Serverless Functions can't do everything yet – long-running processes or guaranteed low latency are reasons why you may have servers or containers lurking in the background. Not a long-term reason for DevOps on every project, but still a factor.
- Serverless has real benefits for developers and the business – running those invisible servers is "someone else's problem", and you get a lot of security, scalability and high availability, "Don't Pay for Idle" is a key point, giving huge cost savings. DevOps is already evolving to meet the challenges of serverless.
- This has been a very quick tour of how Serverless is changing DevOps. Thank you!