[cs615asa] Meetup Summary

[Keyur Ved]

Meetup Information:
Date: April 17, 2018
Topics: Breaking down Dev/Prod Wall + Crossing the Serverless Fireswamp
Link: https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/fmgjmnyxgbwb/

I also recently attended the meetup in NYC organized by the nycdevops
Meetup group.

Talk 1: "Breaking down the Dev/Prod Wall" was presented by Andrew Phillips.
In his talk, Phillips talked about the relationship between teams in the
Software development lifecycle. Since development, operations, and product
management teams are usually separated physically and through the work they
do, they usually have completely different understandings over product
creation. This tends to breed friction
between the teams leading to a dip in quality of the production product.
Phillips described two specific walls: the Dev/Ops wall and the Prod/Dev
wall.
 - The Dev/Ops wall exists between development and operations team and has
been mitigated by various devops efforts.

 - The Prod/Dev wall exists between product management and development
teams and is a major issue negatively impacting product creation. This
exists because of lack of communication between the teams as development
teams usually do not have any interaction with users and tend to create
features or a product that will not be used or that are not user friendly.
On the other hand, product management    teams usually do not have much
software development experience and tend to ask for impossible tasks or
difficult timelines. The solution Phillips presented is to break down the
"wall" is to allow developers interaction between users or to include
product managers in the SDLC. A simpler solution, presented by Phillips is
to make efforts for the two teams to interact with one another in more
social situations.

These issues that arise in software development can be applied to Systems
administrations as there  still exists barriers between systems
administrators and users that can be broken down through  better
interactions between the teams.

Talk 2: "Crossing the Serverless Fireswamp" was presented by Mike Roberts
and was much more technical where Roberts described the usage of Cloud
infrastructure for 2 serverless architectures: Backend as a Service (BaaS)
and Functions as a Service (Faas).

Roberts talked used AWS Lambda as his preferred usage of FaaS and talked
about the benefits and drawbacks of using AWS Lambda. Benefits to AWS
Lambda over other FaaS solutions included:
- Scalability
- Multi-region support
- Abstraction of backend infrastructure - developers do not have to create
servers at all, Amazon handles the backend servers for the user.
- Cost - all the cost is outlined before use and is only based on usage.
- Speed

Roberts also talked about the drawbacks of using Lambda.
- First time use is difficult to master due to UI/UX. There is no real
solution to this
- Lambda will keep scaling and create bottlenecks elsewhere based on use. A
solution would  be to use like-scaling infrastructure or use deliberately
hybrid infrastructure and use structures like message queues to prevent
multiple calls at once.
- Lambda has event-based execution leading to more than one invocation of
the function. A solution here would be to embrace idempotency or to use AWS
Lambda's request ID's to check for previous processing.
- There is no implicit disaster recovery. A solution here would be embrace
multi region support since regions are independent of one another in terms
of infrastructure.
- Cold starts caused by low cache times. A solution here would be to either
not worry about cold starts
since they usually aren't big issues or to make smaller artifacts that
would be used more.
AWS Lambda at Edge could also solve this problem since it is completely
regionless.

Overall, I learned about AWS Lambda, some of the downsides to using this
architecture and how to fix those downsides. Roberts also talked about
situations companies that should definitely use serverless such as small
companies.
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