Building resilient serverless systems

John Chapin explains howin this brave new world of managed services and platformsyou can use serverless technologies and an infrastructure-as-code mind-set to architect, build, and operate resilient systems that survive even massive vendor outages.

In this brave new world of serverless, we entrust our vendors with keeping the infrastructure up and running. However, when even cloud behemoths like AWS and Google Cloud have outages and failures, how can we build resilient systems? John Chapin explains how to use serverless technologies and an infrastructure-as-code approach to architect, build, and operate large-scale systems that are resilient to vendor failures, even while taking advantage of fully managed vendor services and platforms. He then leads an end-to-end demo of the resilience of a well-architected serverless system in the face of massive simulated failure. He further demonstrates how the system not only provides resilience to failure but also has a side effect of improving the end user experience. Finally, John discusses some of the drawbacks and idiosyncrasies of the approach. All source code, infrastructures templates, and slides will be available for the audience to download and explore. While the examples largely focus on AWS—including API Gateway, CloudFormation, DynamoDB, Lambda, and Route 53—the techniques discussed are broadly applicable across cloud vendors.