Weekly update 21

Hi, welcome to another weekly update.

Designing serverless applications with AWS Lambda

I’m running a live online training session with O’Reilly on April 15th and 16th. The session would provide some hands-on exercise for getting started with AWS Lambda and the Serverless framework, and provide you with the tools you need to design serverless applications with Lambda. This is an intermediate level session, and runs for a total of 6 hours over the two days. It is free for SafariBooksOnline subscribers, but you can also take advantage of the free trial and take this session as part of the free trial.

You can find out more about the session and register here.

New posts

DynamoDB TTL as an ad-hoc scheduling mechanism. I explored the idea of using DynamoDB TTL and DynamoDB Streams as a way to implement a scheduling service for ad-hoc tasks. I looked at how this system can be implemented, and how well it works in terms of scalability and precision. After running some experiments I found that, this solution is fairly imprecise. Tasks are executed an average of 10 minutes behind their scheduled time.

Understanding the scaling behaviour of DynamoDB OnDemand tables. I ran a number of experiments to see how DynamoDB manages the scaling of an OnDemand table. I was impressed with what I found – OnDemand tables can support up to 4000 ops/s out of the box. You will still get throttled when you exceed this initial limit. But OnDemand tables would also autoscale and adapt to your peak throughput, so that in the future you won’t experience throttling when you experience the same spike again. Overall, I feel confident about OnDemand tables and think they should be the default for anyone using DynamoDB.

Upcoming presentations

Quite a busy couple of week coming up! If you see me at one of these events, please grab me and say hi :-D

28th March – I’ll be speaking about serverless and FinDev at CloudConf in Turin.

29th March – I’ll be speaking about serverless observability at ServerlessDays Amsterdam.

1st April – I’m joining a star-studded lineup of speakers on 1st April for OpenInfraDays in London. And I’m gonna be talking about serverless, and why it’s more FinDev than it’s DevOps.

2nd April – I’ll be taking a deep dive into how we built a social network on serverless at the AWS Community Summit in Manchester.

3rd April – I’ll be speaking about serverless observability at CodeMotion Amsterdam.

11th April – I’m honoured to be the opening keynote for the first ever ServerlessDays Zurich! I’ll discuss the journey to serverless, the co-evolution of development practices and where we are headed with serverless.

19th April – I’ll be talking about running serverless in production at DevExperience in Iasi. I will also run a one-day workshop after the main event as well.