AWS Re:Invent 2018, day 4

Today was Werner’s turn and boy he didn’t disappoint. The keynote was packed with some very welcome announcements. Again some of the announcements might be missing from the post but those can be found on Twitter, AWS blogs and from the news.

As usual, Werner used a good portion of the keynote to emphasize how critical it is to have control over ones’ infrastructure. To avoid ”black boxes” and to prepare for the fact that ”everything fails all the time”. By now this shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone and if your architecture is not taking this into account you might be in for some nasty surprises in the future. In order to help companies assume best practices, AWS has a so-called ”Well Architected Framework”. This set of guidelines and best practices should be familiar to anyone who is using AWS. Those of you who have done the AWS certifications it is the foundation to learn. Now AWS has come up with ”Well Architected” self-service testing tool. It can be used to assess how well your development, operational and governance practices are aligned with the ”Well Architected Framework”.
However the announcements today were mostly about serverless computing, namely AWS Lambda. There were some huge updates announced like custom runtimes, layers, ALB support, service integrations with step functions and IDE toolkits. The abstraction level keeps on raising and serverless-computing is becoming more and more mainstream.

To easily sum up all the announcements it is now possible to have your lambda-functions be called by ALB while lambdas themselves can be running Rust, C++ or even Cobol and code can be shared between your functions. Your step functions can interact with other services and you can debug your lambda functions. Additionally API gateway now supports websockets. Streaming data has also become mainstream (pun intended) and even though AWS has Kinesis they announced managed Kafka. Running Kafka at scale is no trivial task so this should be a relief for anyone using Kafka but not wanting to handle the maintenance it requires.
Building systems without any servers at all is now much more feasible and serverless should nowadays be given very careful consideration when starting new projects. It could be said that serverless is a valid option for new development activities and instead of prejudice it should be embraced since serverless/Functions as a Service has come to stay.