Serverless Architecture: Applications Without the Pain of Infrastructure

The ObjectSharp Podcast

In this episode we’re talking with ObjectSharp Principal Consultant Dave Judd all about Serverless architecture and how you can start building applications with Azure Functions and without the pain of managing infrastructure. If you've been curious about Serverless and how it fits in with discussions around microservices, this is a great episode to check out. Listen and enjoy!

Minutes

• 0:30 - Jeff Zado introduces the show and the topic of Serverless (PaaS) vs Microservices
• 2:30 - Dave Judd introduces himself
• 2:55 - Dave discusses what is meant by “serverless”
• 3:30 - Dave discusses serverless vs. microservices / Kubernetes and when you might choose one architecture over another
• 6:30 - Dave discusses what’s motivating a transition to serverless, including multiple language support and consumption based pricing
• 7:00 - Dave discusses how the three major cloud vendors (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS) are following similar patterns
• 8:00 - Dave talks about auto-scaling on serverless platforms and global high availability that comes with PaaS
• 10:00 - Dave compares Serverless Functions to Microservices
• 13:20 - Dave talks about how serverless allows you to model your systems to how things actually behave in the real-world, with event-driven / reactive-based architecture
• 14:00 - Dave discusses serverless in Azure, specifically Functions, Event Grid (and the Cloud Event Schema), and Cosmos DB
• 16:30 - Dave talks about managing state in a serverless world
• 18:00 - Dave, Jeff and Nick talk about fanning out thousands of functions to do massive processing in parallel, scaling just the pieces that are needed at a given time as opposed to scaling an entire application with a serverless orchestrator, granular tweaking of performance and cost
• 20:45 - Jeff and Dave talk about performance improvements in serverless runtimes and relative speeds in spinning up functions
• 22:00 - Dave talks about vendor lock-in and whether its potentially illusory in some cases
• 23:00 - Nick and Dave talk about how serverless also enables cross-language collaboration on developer teams and the benefits for engineering managers
• 24:30 - Dave compares serverless offerings on Azure to AWS and Google Cloud
• 25:30 - Dave talks about how serverless can be used not only for new greenfield applications but also to augment older legacy or brownfield monolithic application
• 27:30 - Dave discusses some examples of implementing serverless in the real world, specifically in the fintech sector
• 30:32 - Jeff talks about how the example of the implementation for the fintech company enabled innovation with even better profitability and more calculated costs
• 32:50 - Nick asks Dave to provide a reality check and Dave discusses some issues to consider when moving to a serverless architecture - because everything’s a function, there’s more to manage and consider re deployment of functions that work as a group, versioning and security
• 35:28 - Dave also talks about observability, logging, metrics and analytics and how important that is in a serverless architecture to ensure application resiliency and debug issues that might arise