Best Practices for Serverless Developers

The Evolution of Serverless

• The cloud was born "serverless" with the launch of services like S3 and SQS in 2006
• Serverless really came alive in 2014 with the launch of AWS Lambda and ECS with Fargate
• There are now a huge number of serverless services across compute, storage, workflows, databases, analytics, and more
• Serverless is transforming how software is built, allowing faster iteration and faster time-to-market

Serverful Serverless

• As applications become more serverless, they rely more on external managed services
• This allows taking advantage of native service capabilities and letting AWS handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting
• It can also lower costs and improve resilience
• Orchestration (e.g. Step Functions) and choreography (e.g. EventBridge) can be used for service communication

Reducing Code with Serverless Services

• Managed services like EventBridge pipes can eliminate the need for Lambda functions
• Step Functions can also reduce code by using direct SDK integrations instead of Lambda

Using Serverless Functions and Containers

• Lambda provides an event-driven execution model with over 140 integrations
• Lambda performance is mostly "plug and play", with memory configuration being the main tuning parameter
• Understanding the Lambda lifecycle, including cold starts, is important for optimizing performance and cost

Scaling Serverless Services

• Concurrency is the key metric for understanding Lambda scale and performance
• Reserved and Provisioned Concurrency can help mitigate cold starts
• Account and service-level scaling quotas have been dramatically increased

Using Containers with ECS and Fargate

• ECS provides a fully managed control plane, while Fargate is the serverless data plane
• Containers provide more flexibility and control compared to Lambda, with the trade-off of more management overhead
• Containers can be more cost-effective for high concurrency workloads

Best Practices for Scaling Serverless Best Practices

• Service Blueprints: GitHub templates that encode serverless best practices
• Architectural Patterns: Reusable building blocks for common serverless architectures

What's Next for Serverless?

• Continued improvements to the developer experience, with features like the new Lambda console and Application Builder in the AWS Toolkit
• More governance and control features, like the new private API Integrations for Step Functions and EventBridge
• Broader and simpler Integrations to enable doing more with serverless services