The seamless scaling and headache-free reliability of a serverless application architecture has become compelling to a broad community of cloud specialists. But for those who have yet to become converts, a specific issue related to service startup latency—Cold Starts—has been one of the cited key objections. Fortunately, the serverless marketplace is maturing.
I’d like to take a moment to point out some of my favorite things that have come across my Twitter timeline in the last week, if you’d like to see more follow Stackery on twitter!
You know what they say: successful deploys are all alike; every unsuccessful deploy is unsuccessful in its own way (ok, no one actually says that, except engineers who have read way too much Russian literature, ahem).
Come January, pretty much any current tech keyword you type into Google News will result in hundreds of prediction op-eds and roundups. The fact that it’s an entirely new decade has amplified this phenomenon and serverless is no exception. As the CEO of a company dedicated to helping software teams build, manage, and deliver serverless applications, it’s a joy to read these posts by some of the brightest minds in the industry.
Local prototyping has become de rigueur for most web stack developers in the last few years. Even complex web backends are generally assumed to be emulatable from a developer’s laptop. But this assumption breaks down a bit as we explore the AWS platform in general. More specifically, serverless architecture challenges the system of local prototyping.
Serverless is a quickly-maturing technology and, if you’ve followed its evolution over the past several years, you’ve likely seen a host of great (and not-so-great) documentation of its technology and practices. Now that serverless is a much more mainstream topic for reputable outfits to report on, it’s become easier to comb through serverless fact and fiction in the media.
Serverless can bring opportunities by making DevOps more accessible to folks new to the industry. It can also bring opportunities to folks already in the industry that want to spend more time focusing on adding business value. But many technologists, seasoned or otherwise, hear a lot about serverless but don’t always know how to get started.
Among the many, MANY announcements at re:Invent this year is one that settles a years-long debate or concern amongst people considering using AWS Lambda to build serverless applications: cold starts. AWS Lambda is now 5 years old. For all of that time, there’s been a concern about latency the first time a function is called. Well, fret no more: with Provisioned Concurrency you can pay a tiny fee to know Lambda functions are always available.
At re:Invent 2019, Farrah and I gave a talk on our paths into the tech industry, how serverless helped us both build some of our first products, and how serverless represents a new mindset. I’d wanted to share a version of that talk on our blog for those who couldn’t make it, though we hope to give it again in the near future.
Have you ever have that dream where you’re in a class on Classical Tibetan Algebra? And you haven’t done any homework all semester? AND it’s the final? That was me in this session: I was WAY in over my head with this one. Tod Golding’s material was so high-level that I got a nose bleed. Seriously. My nose started gushing 10 minutes in. This Portland dewdrop is NOT used to the dry desert and casino AC air.
