May 2019: Serverless

calendar May 27, 2019 · 2 min read · serverless  ·
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Meetup #60. Please RSVP at Meetup.

We get started at 6:30 pm.

Sponsors

Venue provided by Startup Edmonton.

Food sponsored by Bellstone Engineering.

Talks

Go Func Yourself! A brief introduction to serverless Go

Matthias Stone gave a beginner-friendly introduction to serverless Go, explaining FaaS ("Cloud Functions") as a business-logic-only approach where applications deploy as individual endpoints and there are — despite the name — still servers. He compared the major providers (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and self-hosted OpenFaaS) and the case for serverless: automatic scaling, forced stateless design, low maintenance, low cost, and low operational expertise. The talk contrasted AWS Lambda, which handles request parsing and offers a large connected ecosystem (shown with the aws-lambda-go lambda.Start example), with Google Cloud Platform's more idiomatic http.Handler functions and source-repo deployment. He closed with the practical complications: cold versus warm starts, per-instance logging that must be collected, bringing your own ops coordination, and no hand-holding for running functions offline.

Key points:

  • Serverless/FaaS means deploying individual endpoints; servers still exist.
  • Providers: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud, Azure, and self-hosted OpenFaaS.
  • Benefits: auto-scaling, stateless design, low maintenance and cost.
  • AWS Lambda uses aws-lambda-go and handles request parsing.
  • GCP uses idiomatic Go http.Handler functions and source deploys.
  • Watch out for cold vs warm starts, per-instance logging, and offline testing.

Matthias Stone (slides)

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