Going Serverless with AWS Lambda and API Gateway

BTW: I really hate the marketing inventions. There's no cloud, or serverless, you still run your software on someone's server.

Serverless is brand new, and has all the burrs of a freshly cut service. Expect sharp corners, like bizarre documentation and lack of examples. I think it goes without saying that tooling and Best Practices are still immature. In my work (Lambdas) I've found they do well when organizing small pieces of work and event driven systems. They really do talk with all of AWS and event triggers are popping up all over their infrastructure.

For me, Serverless is more about "not writing server boilerplate/provisioning" than "not having servers". The largest hurdle conceptually has been hoisting tangential concerns from the application into the infrastructure primitives. Here are some examples in my current work:

* The API Gateway does routing, some payload modification for headers, as well as authentication and authorization.

* I'm also relying more on security groups and specialized IAM roles instead of application specific authorization code. This leaves me with only the application specific code to be called.

* Lambdas communicate with each other through SNS (and only when authorized via IAM).

* All of my application code (currently) exists as Lambdas.

This comes at a cost of infrastructure complexity and a learning curve. I'm also not using several services that AWS provides just to keep my cognitive load from exploding.

Serverless Overall: Like exploring the jungles of Africa! Lots of really cool ideas and deployments, but here be lions!

Containers are on the march of maturation. For me, the most useful part of Docker is decoupling the local application needs with the deployment environment. I exploit that decoupling to make sterile local development environments with Docker/Compose. The recent Docker OSX/Windows support smooths out the last few bumps in my dev workflow.

The deployment, however, is still maturing. To be fair, it's mostly a distributed computation problem and not unique to Docker. Kubernetes is a bear, but an improving one. Same with E2C from what I've heard from friends. On a smaller scale, it significantly opens up the playing field for less popular languages/tools. Heroku's Docker support, for example, allows for any language to be deployed as long as it accepts the Docker contract.

Docker Overall: a) Local is AWESOME! b) Deployment is the Wild West. Still largely unsettled but the Oregon Trail is OPEN!