Philly ETE 2016 #34 – Tim Wagner – Server-Less Design Patterns for the Enterprise with AWS Lambda
Apps no longer just run on smartphones and tablets – they process verbal commands we speak to devices like Amazon Echo, run as bots in Slack channels, and are rapidly evolving customer experiences that span a range of IoT devices in homes, cars, offices, and industrial settings. Crucial to the success of all these ecosystems is one central idea: Code has to not just run in the cloud, it has to be easy to get it there and scale it there. Serverless computing – calling AWS Lambda functions instead of managing heavyweight applications on infrastructure – is changing how developers think about backends, event-driving processing, and application design. Infrastructure, deployment, and software platform setup that used to take days or weeks of time vanishes, replaced by microservices that do one thing well, require zero effort to deploy, and scale automatically and implicitly just by using them. At the same time, AWS Lambda and other serverless systems have redefined cloud economics by eliminating the possibility of cold servers, creating a radical new price point for applications running in the cloud and freeing developers and COO’s alike from worrying about paying for unused capacity. In this talk we’ll define Serverless computing, examine the key trends and innovative ideas behind the technology, and look in detail at design patterns for big data, event processing, mobile backends, and more using AWS Lambda.