Let’s Architect! Serverless architecture on AWS

Serverless architecture and computing allow you and your teams to focus on delivering business value in place of investing time tweaking the infrastructure characteristics. AWS is not only providing serverless computing as a service, but share that half of our new applications built by Amazon are using AWS Lambda, as noted by Andy Jassy in his 2020 re:Invent keynote.

In this post, we share insights into reimagining a serverless environment.

I Build Applications – Event-driven Architecture

Event-driven architecture is common in modern applications built with microservices, and it is the cornerstone for designing serverless workloads. It uses events to trigger and communicate between decoupled services.

With this video, you can learn how to start with a prototype then scale to mass adoption using decoupled systems that run when responding to, without needing to redesign. Danilo Poccia, Chief Evangelist at AWS, begins the session with the APIs, then gives an example on how to build an event-driven architecture using Amazon EventBridge. The session closes with how to understand what is happening in this exchange of events.

Event-driven communication with asynchronous invocation

Building modern cloud applications? Think integration

This re:Invent 2021 session explains modern cloud applications based on serverless or microservices, and how connections between components define important characteristics, like scalability, availability, and coupling.

How your systems are interconnected describes your system’s essential properties, such as resiliency and changeability. Gregor Hohpe, AWS Enterprise Strategist, shares tips on what to consider when integrating different services, such as lifecycle, level of control over the systems you are integrating, and how integration becomes an integral part of your software delivery cycle. The goal is to use the same method to integrate at the same speed as software deployment.

Integration approaches with Gregor Hohpe

Serverless architectural patterns and best practices

Serverless architectures require a mindset shift: existing patterns need to be revisited, and new patterns created using the new architecture style. For each pattern created by AWS, we provide operational, security, and reliability best practices and discuss potential challenges. We also demonstrate some patterns in reference architecture diagrams.

This session helps you identify services and applications to create serverless architectures and understand areas of potential savings, increased agility, and reliability in your organization. Heitor Lessa, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, starts the session identifying the benefits of Lambda Power Tuning: he details setting up memory when there are hundreds of functions, then follows with best practices for the pattern created.

Best practices for serverless architecture

Best practices of advanced serverless developers

This session is an overview of architectural best practices, optimizations, and handy codes that can be used to build secure, scalable, and high-performance serverless applications.

Julian Wood, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, provides the recommended practices for implementing serverless applications inside your company, such as Lambda, to transform and not transport, avoid monolithic services and functions, orchestrate workflow with step functions, choreograph events. Julian also touches on understanding different ways you can invoke Lambda functions and what you should be aware of with each invocation model.

Three types of AWS Lambda invocation models

Building next-gen applications with event-driven architectures

Maintaining data consistency across multiple services can be challenging. It can also be difficult to work with large amounts of data in different data stores and locations. Teams building microservices architectures often find that integration with other applications and external services can make their workloads more monolithic and tightly coupled.

In this session, you can learn how to use event-based architectures to decouple and decentralize application components. Coupling is not one-dimensional, and it’s a trade-off to balance and optimize over time. This video demonstrates patterns based on message queues and events: for each pattern you can learn the advantages, the disadvantages, and the options for building it on AWS.

Sam Dengler, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, explains the mental models to apply while designing choreography and orchestration in a scenario with microservices. The strategy adopted by Taco Bell for identifying their bounded contexts is also detailed, as well as the architecture built on Lambda for running the business logic and on AWS Step Functions for orchestration.

Choreography and orchestration are two modes of interaction in a microservices architecture

See you next time!

Thanks for joining our discussion on serverless architecting! If you want to deep dive into the topic, read all about Serverless on AWS!

See you in a couple of weeks when we discuss architecting for resilience!

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