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We recently joined in an interesting two-hour long conversation about
Serverless JavaScript led by Steve Faulkner of Bustle who answered
questions on Bustle, the Shep framework, the mindset behind the AWS
Lambda infrastructure, and related topics.
The discussion took place on the Sideway conversation-sharing platform on January 6th. Here we present the best takeaways from the session which really should be taken notice of by anyone working on AWS.
Steve Faulkner:
At Bustle we serve over 50 million unique readers per month through a "serverless" architecture based on AWS Lambda and Node.js. Of course there are still servers but we don't manage them. This shift has allowed us to develop products faster and decreased the cost of our infrastructure. I'll answer any questions about how we made this transition and how it has worked out. I'll also discuss some of the tools and best practises including our open source framework shep
Eran Hammer:
When would you NOT use serverless architecture?
Steve Faulkner:
AWS Lambda functions specifically are stateless and have a 5 minute max execution time. This is no problem for our use case, but obviously there are many that would be disqualified immediately based on those two constraints. Serverless can also be expensive if you have very uniform predictable load. In Bustle's case this is where serverless shines. We are able to scale with our spikey traffic quite easily.
I could also see some performance critical situations where serverless wouldn't be ideal. We have done a lot of work to achieve good response times with API gateway and Lambda, but if you are trying to tune for ultra low response times it might now be ideal. I'll say we are quite happy and regularly achieve < 200ms response times for our server side rendered JavaScript applications
full article on i-programmer.info
The discussion took place on the Sideway conversation-sharing platform on January 6th. Here we present the best takeaways from the session which really should be taken notice of by anyone working on AWS.
Steve Faulkner:
At Bustle we serve over 50 million unique readers per month through a "serverless" architecture based on AWS Lambda and Node.js. Of course there are still servers but we don't manage them. This shift has allowed us to develop products faster and decreased the cost of our infrastructure. I'll answer any questions about how we made this transition and how it has worked out. I'll also discuss some of the tools and best practises including our open source framework shep
Eran Hammer:
When would you NOT use serverless architecture?
Steve Faulkner:
AWS Lambda functions specifically are stateless and have a 5 minute max execution time. This is no problem for our use case, but obviously there are many that would be disqualified immediately based on those two constraints. Serverless can also be expensive if you have very uniform predictable load. In Bustle's case this is where serverless shines. We are able to scale with our spikey traffic quite easily.
I could also see some performance critical situations where serverless wouldn't be ideal. We have done a lot of work to achieve good response times with API gateway and Lambda, but if you are trying to tune for ultra low response times it might now be ideal. I'll say we are quite happy and regularly achieve < 200ms response times for our server side rendered JavaScript applications
full article on i-programmer.info
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