Weekly update 02

Hi, welcome to the second edition of my weekly updates.

Come join me at DAZN

It’s been a hectic first few weeks at DAZN for me. If you haven’t heard about us, we’re the Netflix of Sports – an affordable platform for streaming live sports. We are launched in 5 countries, with many more to come pending rights negotiations.

With millions of subscribers already, we have a sizeable technical challenge on our hands to ensure we have a scalable and resilient platform. The platform needs to support millions of sports fans tuning in to watch their favourite team play at the same time! We use a mixture of container-based technologies (AWS ECS) and serverless (AWS Lambda) heavily.

I’m looking for senior engineers to join our team in London and help take DAZN to the next level. If the technical challenges sound interesting to you, then get in touch via the contact form. In terms of profile, this is what I’m looking for:

• you have built backend systems that need to scale to thousands or even tens of thousands of concurrent users
• you have experience being on-call for systems that you built, and diagnosing live issues under pressure
• you are familiar with principles of microservices, and common pitfalls to avoid
• you are no stranger to working with public clouds – i.e. AWS, GCP or Azure
• you enjoy getting your hands dirty and solving challenging problems
• you prefer not to “own complexity” unless it’s absolutely necessary
• you understand the tradeoffs in the technical decisions you face, and you place smart bets
• you are not afraid to challenge the status quo, and you welcome others to challenge your decisions

MEAP update for Production-Ready Serverless

Two new units on logging and monitoring has been added to the MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) of my video course Production-Ready Serverless. As we speak, I am finishing off the next unit on using AWS X-Ray.

Remember, whilst the course is still in the MEAP, you can get 40% off the face price using the code ytcui.

New posts

How to go all in with Serverless adoption. I shared a 10-step guide on how you can go all in with Serverless.

Serverless observability, what can you use out of the box? A thorough examination of the first party tools from AWS that we can use to build observability into our serverless applications. We looked at CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Metrics and X-Ray. We discussed their strengths and shortcomings, and workarounds for current limitations.

You need to sample debug logs in production. Whilst it’s common practice to disable debug logs in production to save cost, it leaves us without any debug messages needed to debug problems that arise in production. Follow along with this post to see you can sample debug messages instead, so you always have some debug messages.

How to do fan-out and fan-in with AWS Lambda. We discussed how you can implement the push/pull, or fan-out/fan-in messaging pattern using AWS Lambda.

My top picks from JeffConf Hamburg 2018.

Some good reads from this week

AWS shared tips for success: GDPR lessons learned.

Serverless Inc announced Serverless Components, a way to create serverless applications using composable, higher-order components. This looks really exciting, and on the face of it, more flexible than AWS’s take with Serverless Application Repository.

Adrian Hornsby shared how you can build a multi-region, active-active backend solution using AWS Lambda, regional API Gateway, DynamoDB Global Tables and Route53.

Harvard Business Review published an article on why you shouldn’t give cash performance bonuses in a loss-making company.

A new article from TechTarget reports that AWS Lambda currently holds 70% of the serverless market!

Serverless Inc shared how to manage canary deployments using the new Canary Deployment Plugin.

TheNewStack published a post about Gloo, a function gateway that unifies legacy APIs, microservices and serverless.

ServerlessDays everywhere!

JeffConf is no more. It was perhaps always too much of an inside joke in the first place.. Although the community is still arguing over the definition of serverless, at least it’s vaguely understood by everyone. So I for one am happy that JeffConf has been ServerlessDays but still keeps the original spirit of local, affordable conferences for anyone interested in serverless.

There are a whole bunch of ServerlessDays events popping up in the next 12 months, and I’m honoured to be one of the keynote speakers at ServerlessDays Tel Aviv next month.

 

Alright, that’s it for another weekly update, see you next week!