February 2017 – Scalable Startups

5 surprising features in Amazon’s Lambda serverless offering

Amazon is building out it’s serverless offering at a rapid clip. Lambda makes a great solution for a lot of different use cases including:

o a hybrid approach, building lambda functions for small pieces of your application, sitting along side your full application, working in concert with it

o working with Kinesis firehose to add ETL functionality into your pipeline. Extract Transform & Load is a method of transforming data from a relational or backend transactional databases, into one better fit for reporting & analytics.

o retrofitting your API? Layer Lambda functions in front, to allow you to rebuild in a managed way.

o a natural way to build microservices, with each function as it’s own little universe

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Great, tons of ways to put serverless to use. What’s Amazon doing to make it even better? Here are some of the features you’ll find indispensible in building with Lambda.

1. Versioned functions

As your serverless functions get more sophisticated, you’ll want to control & deploy different versions. Lambda supports this, allowing you to upload multiple copies of the same function. Coupled with Aliases below, this becomes a very powerful feature.

Also: When hosting data on Amazon turns bloodsport

2. Aliases

As you deploy multiple versions of your functions in AWS, you don’t want to recreate the API endpoints each time. That’s where aliases come in. Create one alias for dev, another for test, and a third for production. That way when new versions of those are deployed, all you have to do is change the alias & QA or customers will be hitting the new code. Cool!

3. Caching & throttling

Using the API gateway, we can do some fancy footwork with Lambda. First we can enabling caching to speedup access to our endpoint. Control the time-to-live, capacity of the cache easily. We’ll also need to invalidate the cache when we make changes & redeploy our functions.

Throttling is another useful feature, allowing you to control the maximum number of times your function can be called per second on average (the rate) and maximum number of times (burst limit). These can be set at both the stage & method levels.

Read: Is Amazon too big to fail?

4. Stage variables

Creating multiple stages, for dev, test & production means you can separate out and control environment variables with more granular control. For example suppose you have access & secret keys to reach S3. You can set environment variables for these to avoid committing any credentials or secrets in your code. Definitely don’t do that!

Allowing multiple copies of stage variables, means you can set them separately for dev, test & production.

Also: How to deploy on Amazon EC2 with Vagrant?

5. Logging

You can enable logging in your Lambda function configuration. This will send error and/or info warning messages out to CloudWatch.

You may also choose the log all of the request & response data. This is controlled in the API Gateway settings for individual stages.

Also: Is Amazon RDS hard to manage?

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As cloud expands, does legacy grow too?

o A publishing company on AWS

I worked with one company in publishing. They had built a complex automation pipeline to deploy code. As a lead engineer planned to exit, I was brought in to provide support during transition. As with large complex websites, there was a lot that was done right, and some things done in old ways. Documenting all the pieces and digging up the dead bodies was a big part of the job.

o Renovating a kitchen

In parallel to the above project, I was renovating my kitchen, in a new home in Brooklyn. Taking on this project myself, I dutifully assembled IKEA cabinents, and laid them out to spec. As I began the painstaking process of leveling for the countertop, I ran into trouble. Measurement after measurement didn’t add up. It seemed one section was shorter than another, where the counter should go.

Since I needed to add support for a dishwasher, that had to be measured correctly. Yet the level tool told a different story than the yardstick. Finally after thinking about it for a few hours, I put the level on the floor itself. Turns out the floor wasn’t level! That explained why cabinets were shorter in one area than another.

o Legacy in 5-7 years?

Complex systems like software, exhibit a lot of the same surprises as old buildings. That was one surprise I wasn’t expecting. As houses are renovated on the 15-30 year timeframe, software seems to experience a five to seven year cycle.

Whether a consequence of shifting sands in the underlying stack, databases, frameworks or cloud components, or the changing needs of product & customers

o Opportunity everywhere

As companies large & small migrate pieces of their systems to the cloud, move to microservices or rebuild on serverless, the opportunities are endless. It seems every firm is renovating their kitchen these days, putting on a new roof or upgrading their data pipeline.