Episode #47: Programming AWS Lambda with Mike Roberts

05/04/20 • 65 min

About Mike Roberts:
Mike Roberts is a partner, and co-founder, of Symphonia - a consultancy specializing in Cloud Architecture and the impact it has on companies and teams. During his career, Mike’s been an engineer, a CTO, and other fun places in-between. He’s a long-time proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is passionate about the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. He sees Serverless as the next evolution of cloud systems and as such is excited about its ability to help teams, and their customers, be awesome.

Twitter: twitter.com/mikebroberts
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikebroberts
Website: mikebroberts.com
Symphonia: www.symphonia.io
Symphonia blog: blog.symphonia.io
Programming AWS Lambda: Build and Deploy Serverless Applications with Java book: shop.oreilly.com

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/16en-TTGNhk

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Mike Roberts. Hey, Mike, thanks for joining me.

Mike: Thank you very much for inviting me, Jeremy.

Jeremy: So, you are a Cloud Architect and DevOps Consultant that specializes in serverless and AWS, and you're also a partner at Symphonia. So, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what Symphonia does.

Mike: Yeah, that'd be great. So, I've been in industry now for 21 years and in that time, I've been an engineer or a senior engineer, manager or CTO, sometimes consulting, sometimes working for product companies, so a whole mixture and sort of up and down the manager versus technical ladder.

About four years ago, I was a VP of Engineering at an ad tech company here in New York and we started using a lot of sort of much higher level AWS technologies and especially at the end of that year, we were using a lot of Lambda, so I really thought that serverless was really interesting and so I wrote an article four years ago now about serverless. That proved to be really popular and I was like, "Oh, wait, other people like this, too. Maybe I should start a company about this kind of stuff." So myself and my business partner, John Chapin, we decided to start Symphonia as a consulting company to help people with the kind of technologies and lessons that we'd sort of seen over the last few years. And that's what we've been doing now for three and a half years.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright. Well, so recently, you and your business partner, John, wrote a book called Programming AWS Lambda, and great title, right, there it is. He's got it. Okay. Now, the thing that struck me though about it was about Java. And so I'm just curious, it's 2020 and so, why would you write a book about serverless programming in Java?

Mike: Mostly because my writing is terrible and I didn't want anyone to actually read the book. No, that's not the reason. It is weird and a lot of the things that you read about Lambda, the examples are in Python or JavaScript or Go and then there's this Java thing. And who actually uses Java with Lambda? Well, it turns out a lot of people use Java with Lambda and the other thing was, it's how we got started with Lambda. So when John and I started using Lambda, which was about three and a half years ago, the Java support has just come out and we were working for a Java shop, so we had a lot of engineers who were very Java savvy. We had all of our Java tool chains all sorted out and so we decided to use Java and Lambda and see how it worked and it worked brilliantly.

And one of the reasons it worked brilliantly was that the system that we were building was pretty high throughput, like we were processing millions of messages a day with Lambda and so we never hit, and even back then, any of the concerns with cold starts or anything like that, and so yeah, it really just fitted in like a glove for us and. And so, when we decided to write the book, we knew that we weren't unique and we knew that there were a lot of other people out there who have built up this knowledge in Java and the ecosystem that surrounds Java and we wanted them to have a book for Lambda, just like JavaScript developers and Python developers and all that kind of thing.

Jeremy: Awesome. Well, so the funny thing is, is that ...

Twitter: twitter.com/mikebroberts
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikebroberts
Website: mikebroberts.com
Symphonia: www.symphonia.io
Symphonia blog: blog.symphonia.io
Programming AWS Lambda: Build and Deploy Serverless Applications with Java book: shop.oreilly.com

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/16en-TTGNhk

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Mike Roberts. Hey, Mike, thanks for joining me.

Mike: Thank you very much for inviting me, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Awesome. Well, so the funny thing is, is that ...

Previous Episode

Episode #46: Serverless Use Cases with Gareth McCumskey (Part 2)

About Gareth McCumskey:

Gareth McCumskey is a web developer with over 15 years of experience working in different environments and with many different technologies including internal tools development, consumer focused web applications, high volume RESTful API's and integration platforms to communicate with many 10's of differing API's from SOAP web services to email-as-an-api pseudo-web services. Gareth is currently a Solutions Architect at Serverless Inc, where he helps serverless customers planning on building solutions using the Serverless framework as well as Developer advocacy for new developers discovering serverless application development.

Twitter: @garethmcc
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garethmcc
Portfolio: gareth.mccumskey.com
Blog Posts: serverless.com/author/garethmccumskey/

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5NXi-6SmZsU

Transcript:

Jeremy: One of the things that I know I've seen quite a bit of is people using just the power of Lambda compute, to do things right? And what's really cool about Lambda is Lambda has a single concurrency model, meaning that every time a Lambda function spins up, it will only handle a request from one user. If that request ends, it reuses warm containers and things like that. But, if you have a thousand concurrent users, it spins up a thousand concurrent containers. But you can use that not just to process requests from let's say frontend WebSocket or something like that. You can use that to actually run just parallel processing or parallel compute.

Gareth: Yeah. This is one of what do they call it, the Lambda supercomputer.

Jeremy: Right.

Gareth: You can get an enormous amount of parallel... Try to say that three times quickly. Parallelization with Lambda. I mean, like I said, by default you get a 1000 Lambda functions that you can spin up simultaneously. And if you ask nicely... Well, you don't even have to ask nicely, just ask them and AWS will increase that to 10,000 simultaneous. And it's really impressive how much compute you can do, to the point where, at one point I was working with a company looking to try to do some load testing of an application.

They had an instance where, on Black Friday, the tech kept falling over. They wanted to try to get some load testing in beforehand to make sure that it can handle at least a certain amount of volume. Because you can never entirely predict what your traffic patterns will look like. But at least let's try something. And they spend a lot of time looking at commercial solutions out there because there are a few of them out there that try to help with that.

And they normally try to do about 500 to maybe a 1000 simultaneous users or simulated users, which is impressive but not quite good enough when you're an organization that's going to be having 10,000 to 20,000 simultaneous users on your site at a time. That gets a bit rough. So the move was then to try and build some load testing application ourselves. And this was initially tricky to do because we were trying to do this using the traditional VMs, virtual machines, and containers in some way, try to get EC2 instances up and running to try and run multiple simultaneous users at a time, in a single VM, using essentially a combination of these end to end testing tools where you can simulate a user flow from loading the homepage to going to a product page, adding to cart, going to checkout. Doing all of this on a staging environment so that you could simulate the whole user for all the way to purchase, the sort of main line to purchase as it were, make sure that you could get a few thousand users all the way to there without issue.

And what ended up happening was these virtual machines just couldn't cope with the load of all these simultaneous users running on a single machine even with inordinate amounts of CPU and RAM on them. So the idea came to us to try and do this with Lambda instead. So what ends up happening is, because you have a thousand simultaneous Lambda functions, AWS also architects this in a way that the noisy neighbor effect of all of these Lambda functions is almost nothing. You can't say nothing.

There has been some research I've read that shows there is a bit of a noisy neighbor effect between Lambda functions. But one interesting thing that we found was this is reduced when you increase the size of your Lambda functions to the maximum memory size, which is pretty cool. Because then uses an entire mac...

Next Episode

Episode #48: Serverless Developer Culture with Linda Nichols

About Linda Nichols:
Linda Nichols is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. In addition to creating software solutions, she has a passion for community involvement and education. She is a co-founder of Norfolk.js, NodeBots Norfolk, and RevolutionConf. She also enjoys teaching local classes and workshops.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e5oFSIMuvcM

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Linda Nichols. Hey, Linda, thanks for being here.

Linda: Hello.

Jeremy: So you are a cloud native technical specialist, and a member of the global black belt team at Microsoft. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Microsoft.

Linda: Sure, sure. So first of all, I have like the most awesome title at Microsoft. And most people don't understand, but it sounds great. Especially you join a call with a customer and they're like, the global black belt is here. But, essentially, we're problem solvers. If someone has a problem, or they want to know how to build something, or they want to have a conversation about maybe like, something that's out of the norm, like, it's not your typical service that a lot of the cloud architects within Microsoft know, or it's something more in the open-source side, something that's heavier into serverless or Kubernetes, or just something that's maybe out in the community. There's a lot of open-source tools and things that we talk about, we could be just the open-source blackbelt team. And my background is development. I was thinking about this today. Like, I'm not afraid to say I'm in my early 40s. And so now, half my life has been developing.

I've had a professional job as a developer for half my life. So it's really like kind of ingrained in me being a developer, even if I'm not coding every single day now, because I'm on the phone a lot, just like chatting with people, but I still, like really enjoy kind of hacking at things and thinking about methodologies. And, that's part of what we do too on our team I mean, maybe someone calls us up and says, I just can't get this working and we help them through it. But also, maybe we just kind of talk about, like why are you doing this this way? And, what you think about this? And how about these tools? And that sort of thing.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright. So I've seen you give a number of presentations actually in a lot of the presentations that you give are around DevOps and serverless, right? And kind of how those things connect. And speaking about being in your early 40s, one of the things I love about your presentation, I'm in my early 40s, as well, I love your, like 80s and 90s References because I get all of them and it is absolutely amazing. So, but your talks usually are around DevOps and how it kind of intersects with serverless. And a lot of times about the serverless developer themselves. And I remember back at Serverlessconf, it was like serverless developers are developers or something like that and it was great talk. So I kind of want to talk to you today, though, about the culture, right? Like this culture around the serverless developer. Because, if you look at people using things like Amplify, there's this whole new thing like a full-stack serverless developer.

And then you've got some people who are kind of focused more on the, I guess, on the infrastructure side of serverless, which is maybe a bit of an oxymoron, but maybe understanding at least how some of these configurations work. So maybe you just give us a quick overview like, what is the overall culture look like for serverless developers?

Linda: Sure, sure. Well, first of all, you threw like an AWS term at me. And I was like, Amplify, which one is that? But, yeah, I mean, I think what I keep trying to kind of drill in, is it like, yeah, serverless developers are developers. And I keep saying too, serverless was made for us, right? I mean, serverless wasn't really it didn't come out and become popular because ops people were like, "No we don't really want to do our jobs." Like we hate infrastructure. No, no, they love it, they've been skeptical this whole time. They're like," Oh, so the developers are going to push to production now. Okay, have fun with that." so I mean, it's essentially for us, so we shouldn't be the ones that are distrustful, we should be the ones that are saying, okay, here's our pro...