[cs615asa] Meetup Summary

[Hongkun Zhang]

Meetup Name: Breaking down Dev/Prod Wall + Crossing the Serverless Fireswamp
Time: April 17, 2018

　The first talk provided by Andrew Phillips, talking about the wall between the Development 
and Operations. Another wall is between the Product management and Development wall. I
think this topic is related to the System Administration, because the System Administrator responsible for 
the company system and they are support for company system service. Just like our university System
Administrator, they need to build the “wall” (permission) for each user and they need to break the wall 
to listen the student and professors feedback of the system. 
   For the first wall aka Development and Operations wall, now exists in company will weaken
the product development cycle and let the whole team less effective.
   The second wall between the Development team and Product Management team. It`s well
known by the Internet Industry. Since the member of product management team responsible
for the business impact and the development team focus on the technical of the product. 
That`s will cause the wall or less communication between these two team. The final output of 
product will not perfect. So, the Phillips give us the solutions that Regular user interactions, 
early backlog insight, visible user-level metrics, surface user feedback, better and more
regular communications. 

  The second talk is “Crossing the Serverless Fireswamp” provided by Mike Roberts. This topic 
is more technical and more related to our course. Since the serverless and cloud computing 
are all need the system administrator to manage the system or the server.
  Since the serverless technology is more popular for some unicorns to deploy their product 
in cloud. And the well-known serverless platform like AWS , Azure, GCP provide really nice 
service like security insurance, zero-cost , flexible management. Is that solution 
always perfect? The answer us no. 
  Phillips make an introduction of AWS S3 storage service and mention several advantages 
of AWS S3. As following, Roberts point out two serverless architecture. BaaS (Backend as a 
Service) and FaaS (Functional as a Service).
  The lecture he provided is use BaaS as an example with AWS Lambda to have a talk. 
Roberts think AWS Lambda have much benefits for serverless such as 
  >Auto-Scaling, means automatic and invisible auto-scaling based on usage
  >No concern of ‘nodes’ or server machines / processes
  >Cost based on Usage
  >Implicit cross-availability zone high availability
  Although the Amazon Lambda have many advantages, the Roberts mention some 
disadvantages of Amazon Lambda. And he give us two examples as follows:
  1, Since our application deployed on multiple regions, that is the advantage of AWS S3 + AWS Lambda.
However, our application will going down when the us-east and us-west services going down. So, we need 
 to deploy our application more carefully.
  2, Too much AWS Lambda deployed in multiple container will burst the database. Because the unmatched scaling for the database.

   What I learn about from this meetup is know the product management experience and serverless technology in second talk.
 For the second talk, it reminds me to study the Lambda, because the AWS Lambda with AWS S3 is a powerful combination to build 
a serverless architecture. However, this combination is not always perfect as the example provided by Roberts showed. So, as a computer
 science engineer, we need dialectical to face a technology. Enjoy a technology benefits and always think the disadvantage of this technology.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/cs615asa/attachments/20180427/c877bac2/attachment.html>