I recently attended the AWS Summit in London and found the day to be immensely rewarding despite the incredible number of people, (the queue for the waffle stand was a sight to behold ). For me, a key takeaway was the continual rise and importance that serverless functions are playing in modern application development.
It was little over 4 years ago at ReInvent that amazon introduced us to Lambda. Since then Serverless, specifically Lambda has experienced rapid adoption, even within larger enterprises that can be risk adverse and slow to adopt transformational technology. However, the benefits are so compelling that it’s no wonder. Lambda is finally delivering on the promises of platform as a service – allowing developers to concentrate on truly differentiating application tier logic with minimal effort invested into managing middleware and infrastructure.
Donilo Poccia, Principal Evangelist, Serverless at Amazon Web Services took us on an excellent deep dive into Lambda, explaining how Servlerless enables you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. In this presentation he introduces many of the tools and services that compliment Lambda such as API Gateway, step functions (i’ve written on a blog post on this recently), SQS and AWS CodePipeline. For a technical intro into Lambda i’d suggest taking a look at his deck here.
As part of this, Caroline Rennie from Comic Relief gave insightful presentation, detailing Comic Relief’s shift from monolith to Serverless. She explained how they started with a low risk small blast zone application “The fund raiser gallery” to test out Lambda. Using this implementation to both learn and gain trust from within the organization Caroline and team were able to gradually scale the approach out across their digital ecosystem. Her advice to:
“find your fundraiser gallery”
Was spot on and an aproach i took myself when first getting to grips with Lambda, using it initially to handle simple form post submissions.
Now, increasingly i’m re-assessing how i build applications. The shift from monolith to microservices with multiple event driven serverless functions opens up a world of possibilities that might have been too costly to run, scale, & maintain with traditional server setups. Now is an exciting time to be a developer!
The Web Smith 