Serverless technologies are getting more and more popular according to TechCrunch. Even though this approach is still fresh, many experienced engineers have already played with it. That’s why we decided to organize a meetup in London at CodeNode for the CTOs of tech startups who are curious about implementing some serverless components to their software architectures.
TOPICS
Basically, we discussed a few key topics during the event around the serverless current state and its real examples. Here are a few of them:
- What is the current state of Lambda and other serverless AWS services, their future direction?
- What are the newest serverless architecture examples?
- What challenges in the development and deployment processes you can face?
- How do serverless architecture and components work on the production of SaaS startup for Fortune 5000 companies?
- How to execute a partial transition to the serverless environment for your existing product and decrease infrastructure costs?
SPEAKERS
Among the speakers, we had a couple of really amazing tech folks:
- Ragnar Harper, Partner Solution Architect, ISV at AWS
- Andrew Kuzmych, Co-Founder & CTO at TechMagic / AWS Solutions Architect
- Adrian King, Co-Founder & CTO at Elements.cloud
- Artem Arkhipov, Lead Serverless Developer at TechMagic, Conference Speaker
PRESENTATIONS
We started from the general introduction of serverless infrastructure based on AWS services. This topic was covered in a great way by Ragnar Harper from the AWS office in London. He shared the story of how Amazon came to the serverless in general, what are the main applications and common use cases of serverless today, and which services AWS provides in this domain. Also, he presented a few insights on API Gateway, Step Functions, Serverless Application Model (SAM), and SAM CLI.
Then we had a presentation from Andrew Kuzmych, the CTO at TechMagic, who is a Certified AWS Solutions Architect. His main message to the audience was based on the 3 serverless architecture examples and their monthly costs. These projects were developed by TechMagic team so the numbers are real. So, Andrew presented:
- video education platform which has 15000 video uploads per month, 1M video streams per month, and 50 MB average file size. The monthly architecture costs were around $6900.
- social media analytics platform which has 1000 clients, 5 marketing channels per client, and almost real-time analytics (1h). The monthly architecture costs were around $1750.
- data storage platform for a single organization with 1000 active users per day, 100K http(s) requests per day, 2 KB average request size, 200K reads per hour in the DB, 50K writes per hour in the DB. The monthly architecture costs were around $220 with a traditional EC2 approach, while serverless one allowed to save it up to $19 per month.
- data storage platform for 100 organizations with 100K active users per day, 10M http(s) requests per day, 2 KB average request size, 20M reads per hour in the DB, 5M writes per hour in the DB. The monthly architecture costs were around $2530 with traditional a EC2 approach, while serverless one made it around $3090 per month.
The main conclusion was that serverless is good for the cases when you have an asymmetric and unpredictable load, while the ordinary applications with a predictable amount of users/transactions are better deployed on traditional EC2 instances.
After that, we had a speech from Adrian King, who is the CTO at Elements.cloud. It is a B2B SaaS platform which helps to visualize and organize business processes of the Fortune 5000 companies. He mainly shared his experience of building such a complicated SaaS solution with Serverless components based on the JavaScript Stack and AWS architecture. Also, he told a story of cooperation with TechMagic where more than 20 highly-skilled Node.js, Angular developers and QA engineers are building Elements 5 days a week during the last 3 years.
Adrian’s speech was supported by the presentation of Artem Arkhipov who is the Lead Developer on Elements.cloud project. Artem shared some deep technical examples of how we implemented Lambda in the Elements.cloud architecture and which benefits we got out of there.
SUMMARY
Even though serverless is a great and modern approach which highly interesting for developers, we should always keep in mind that it’s not cheaper in all cases, there is still a lack of monitoring tools, testing or debugging might be a pain sometimes, and performance can depend on the cold starts of “ephemeral containers”. Anyways, big giants like AWS are making improvements every day, while extremely innovative and technically intelligent startups like PureSec, Dashbird, and Epsagon support the whole process with their advanced solutions.
In TechMagic, we always try to work with the latest technologies, immediately integrate them into ongoing projects, and get the latest knowledge visiting global conferences. You can check our latest trips to Serverlessconf New York and Serverlessconf Paris.
If you are interested in any consultancy on serverless applications, serverless development, serverless deployment, serverless monitoring, or serverless security, please contact us at:
