This is part four of the “Well-Architected Serverless” series. In this post, we’ll talk about the Cost Optimization (COST) pillar of the Well-Architected Framework (WAF). Part 1: Security Part 2: Operational Excellence Part 3: Reliability The COST pillar concerns itself with the money you spend on your cloud infrastructure. It’s important to think about your system’s cost because, in reality, the perfect system won’t be used simply because it’s too expensive.

Today, AWS announced another major feature to the Lambda platform: the option to package your code and dependencies as container images. The advantage of this capability is that it makes it easier for enterprise users to use a consistent set of tools for security scanning, code signing, and more. It also raises the maximum code package size for a function to a whopping 10GB.

The serverless technology feels as exciting and challenging as it was deploying our first app to the internet, seeing it come to life, work and also crash a lot. The latter happening more than we wanted at the begging, but later, when we managed to overcome that challenge, we felt like we could do anything. Depending on the interests, we could focus more on our code and leave that task of deploying, monitoring, and giving support for the apps to the DevOps guys.

Serverless architectures are all about offloading as much operational overhead to the cloud as possible. For the past six years, this primarily meant writing business logic as small pieces of code (< 250MB in size) that are zipped up and given to the cloud to run on demand. This simple model deceptively belies the true power of serverless applications. Because modern applications are often composed of a set of small microservices, each compute resource can itself be minimal in size.

We are excited to announce that if you deploy our AWS Trivia Alexa Skill from Stackery we will send you $100 AWS credits and an Amazon Echo!

Serverless is a great way to reduce the cost of running applications. Lambda functions, by nature, make it very easy to use the exact amount of resources we need at any given point. In this post, we deep dive into Lambda costs, how they are calculated, and explore how to optimize them. Lambda costs are calculated from two parameters (all prices are for AWS N.Virginia, US-EAST-1).

If you think it’s possible to accomplish great things without going through numerous trials and errors first – you’re wrong. We learn to become better and more efficient through experience, and gaining experience requires you to make multiple attempts, but it also requires you to fail to learn from your mistakes. You’ll achieve greatness only once you learn how to handle errors that stand in your way, and when you do, everything becomes crystal clear.

This is part three of the “Well-Architected in Serverless” series where we decipher the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) pillars and translate them into real-life actions. In this article, we will focus on the AWS WAF Reliability (REL) pillar. Read Part 1 and Part 2. We have a Well Architected webinar coming up!