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Notes – ServerlessDays NZ 2024

Those are my notes for ServelessDays NZ - Auckland, at 24th May 2024.

Sheen Brisals - Think, Architect, and Build Serverless Applications as Set Pieces

During ServerlessDaysNZ Sheen Brisals gave the talk Think, Architect, Build, Sustain Serverless Application Set Pieces. It was full of important insights to Set Pieces and sustain Serverless Applications.

I particularly liked how he touched on the fact that legacy applications being rewritten to Serverless is a thing, as this is everywhere being part of lots of engineers' lives.

More than that, Brisals highlighted how patterns and pivotal for a maintainable and reliable application, despite the execution model:

  • Identify Domains so you can decouple a domain to rewrite it more effectively
  • Complexity is better abstracted, becoming simpler, when you know and apply good proven Patterns -- the exception is to invent a new one
  • Design Patterns, Architecture Patterns, Execution Model patterns, Software Design, etc, will improve the quality of your Application. As Serverless will likely push you to learn them, you have the opportunity to develop as an Architect
  • The Serverless should help you to think in the whole picture, as the settled pieces need communication between them, therefore optimising value to the end-user

Unfortunately, I was not selected to win the book Serverless Development on AWS, but for those who won, I wish they could learn a lot there. What a great indication of how good a fellow is Sheen. Giving away those books is a gigantic contribution to the community!

I am very pleased to know you in person, Sheen.

This presentation talked a lot with Michael Walmsley's. So nice.

Heitor Lessa - Let Them Retry: Idempotency for the Rest of Us

Despite being common to talk or to assess if a given application or infrastructure follows best practices and great architectural patterns, implementing this is a challenge for development teams for different reasons.

Heitor Lessa, in his talk "Let Them Retry: Idempotency for the Rest of Us", demonstrates how a tool that improves the Developer Experience bringing the implementation of the patterns close to the code is powerful to win adoption. PowerTools is a developer toolkit to accelerate development providing interfaces and abstractions to implement Serverless best practices.

Heitor used a sample code, emulating an existent codebase, from an application already working in Production. We had the opportunity to see the appeal of PowerTools. Usually, Idempotency (to handle duplicated transactions) is associated with a good amount of change in the code. Still, PowerTools was designed to introduce no or very few impacts to a code that is very dangerous to change. As building blocks, adding more complex functionalities, such as caching, payload tempering and failure mode.

The existence of tools like PowerTools reinforces how implementing good and proven software (and architectural) patterns is pivotal for a scalable and reliable application. The Serverless execution mode can mislead to relaxed code, but that would weaken the performance and stability of an application. The lesson is that working smarter is applying known solutions for specific problems.

PowerTools provides a wide range of functionalities, not surprisingly being able to match Well-Architected frameworks in their implementation: Secrets/System Manager Parameters, Event Source Data Classes, Validation, Feature Flag, Idempotency, Data Masking, Streaming, Middleware, JMESPath, Batch processing, Metrics, Tracing. We avoid writing boilerplates, repeated code and even the need to create a shared lib of constructs ourselves. The community is improving it.

PowerTools is a helpful tool to implement these features. This is an opportunity to learn and deep dive into best practices and designs. It also enhances how you observe and monitor your application. It is a serious tool to consider if you intend to leverage how your code is executed, deployed, monitored and performed.

In his talk, Heitor implemented, live in the meeting, Idempotency into a legacy code. He enriched it with failure modes, caching, payload tampering and order tolerance. So, PowerTools is also very easy and quick to use.

Best practices for everyone

  • Heitor Lessa

Michael Walmsley - Unleashing Serverless Scalability on AWS: Practical Strategies and Proven Patterns

Some started Michael Walmsley introduction saying "A fantastic human being...". And I will start from there as well because I have experienced that myself.

I bumped into Michael while walking to the conference venue. I first heard about it from a great friend, Joshua Katz, who was impressed with Michael. It was a very pleasant walk while sharing quick impressions of being AWS Community Builders and excitement about the conference.

It happens that Michael is now an AWS Hero with many years of experience to share. One of the first things he said in his talk was replaying Suzana Melo Moraes (you should listen to this girl - so inspiring), who has three years in tech, when she was saying that, mostly every day, she struggles with something usually starting from having no idea how to fix a particular problem she was assigned to solve. Michael sympathised, saying that, even after 30 years, there are days that things happen to him the same way. This happens in everyone involved in this field and it was so humbling coming from him.

As usual, Michael doesn't keep secrets by himself but shares insightful tips. His presentation was about Unleashing Serverless Scalability on AWS:

  • Start the design with the needed scalability in mind (can you see that links to Sheen Brassals talk?)
  • Master and understand well the limits, they are there for a reason and as early you design your application to work with them, better design your application and scalable-ready it is
  • Events, Messages, and Commands are the way of communication for Serverless and a must-know subject
  • Do not ignore Flow Control
  • Break your application limits before someone else does -- use performance tests in your favour
  • Study and use proven patterns (check https://serverlessland.com)

Brad Jacques - Delivering at pace while evolving a Serverless architecture

Brad Jacques delivered a talk titled "Delivering at pace while evolving a Serverless architecture" at ServerlessDays NZ. Brad covered a challenging project where file manipulation use cases were an important feature.

"Complexity is everywhere". Brad could not help it advise that a successful delivery starts from breaking the complexity into pieces, to plan ahead of time and to do the simple things first. He mentioned that the deadline was short, affirming it was the right strategy to evolve the architecture.

He also stressed the use of established patterns for success, such as breaking down complexity, identifying domains and context boundaries, and understanding limits and messaging.

It was also important how the work was planned with the team. Having a small committed team, fast feedback loops and continuous measurement were key to proving the solution was correct.

The summary is so great that I will copy it here entirely:

  • Do the simple thing first
  • Small teams with a fast feedback loop (showcase often)
  • Identify risk early, shift left, and spike
  • Continuously measure performance, and stress test
  • Isolate context boundaries
  • The solution must prove itself correct

Brad's insights were based on his experience with a new project for a major client at a consultancy company. However, it was clear that the principles and strategies he shared apply to any application, in any industry, and of any size.

His parting advice was to "evolve your architecture, measure, and make decisions throughout the process."

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Don't do this: creating useless indexes

This is why, when I’m called for a performance problem (or for an audit), my first take is to look at the size of the data compared to the size of the indexes. If you store more indexes than data for a transactional workload, that’s bad. The worst I’ve seen was a database with 12 times more indexes stored on disk than data! Of course, it was a transactional workload… Would you buy a cooking book with 10 pages of recipes and 120 pages of indexes at the end of the book?

The problem with indexes is that each time you write (insert, update, delete), you will have to write to the indexes too! That can become very costly in resources and time.

PXP

PXP is a superset of the PHP programming language. It is heavily inspired by the goals of the TypeScript project and aims to improve and enhance PHP with transpilation.

Functional Classes

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

What is a class? According to the dictionary a class is:

A set, collection, group, or configuration containing members regarded as having certain attributes or traits in common; a kind or category.

The Simple Class

I work in many legacy code bases, and in fact, I’ve made it a big part of my career. I love diving into big monoliths that have grown out of proportion and tidying them up. One of the best parts of that work is rewriting a God class into a collection of small reusable classes. Let’s take a look at what makes a simple class great.

The economics of clean code

Code smarter. Code balanced. That is OK to have some debt. But pay them off quickly.

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Enabling the Optimal Serverless Platform Team — CDK and Team Topologies

Serverless, and related technologies, have enabled teams to move faster, reduce total cost of ownership and overall empowered developers to have greater ownership of the systems they build. However, Serverless is not a silver bullet — there is an organisational side that’s key to unlock the full benefits of Cloud.

Restructuring a Laravel Controller using Services, Events, Jobs, Actions, and more

A simple but nice walk-though about code decoupling.

The Serverless Server

I'm Will Jordan, and I work on SRE at Fly.io. We transmogrify Docker containers into lightweight micro-VMs and run them on our own hardware in racks around the world, so your apps can run close to your users. Check it out—your app can be up and running in minutes. This is a post about how services like ours are structured, and, in particular, what the term "serverless" has come to mean to me.

Keep Cognitive Complexity Low with PHPStan

What is cognitive complexity? It's the amount of information we have to hold in our heads simultaneously to understand the code. The more indents, continue, break, nested foreach, and if/else branches, the harder is code to read.

You can use PHPStan rules to decrease the cognitive complexity of your codebase. This brings matuiry to your application and a more maintainable code.

How to release PHP 8.1 and 7.2 package in the Same Repository

Some steps to release a package in more than one version, to allow compatibility for different PHP runtimes.

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Why I Will Never Use Alpine Linux Ever Again

Alpine image is heavily use as a base image for all sort of applications. Some applications, usually running in Kubernetes, are facing issues due to Alpine implementation of musl. This article describes how those issues can cause a great amount of grief.

3 years of lift-and-shift into AWS Lambda

Let’s set the scene. We’re looking for scaling a PHP application. Googling around take us to find out that AWS Lambda is the most scalable service out there. It doesn’t support PHP natively, but we got https://bref.sh. Not only that, we also have Serverless Visually Explained which walk us through what we need to know to get PHP up and running on AWS Lambda. But we have a 8 year old project that was not designed from the ground up to be serverless. It’s not legacy. Not really. It works well, has some decent test coverage, a handful of engineers working on it and it’s been a success so far. It just has not been designed for horizontal scaling. What now?

Different beliefs about software quality

Good advices on how to deal with an environment where you have conflicts about your beliefs and how the environment work.

Increase code coverage successively

I often come across legacy projects that have a very low code coverage (or none at all). Getting such a project up to a high code coverage can be very frustrating as you will have a poor code coverage for a very long time.

So instead of generating an overall code coverage report with every pull request I tend to create a so called patch coverage report that checks how much of the patch is actually covered by tests.

Conway's Law

Pretty much all the practitioners I favor in Software Architecture are deeply suspicious of any kind of general law in the field. Good software architecture is very context-specific, analyzing trade-offs that resolve differently across a wide range of environments. But if there is one thing they all agree on, it's the importance and power of Conway's Law. Important enough to affect every system I've come across, and powerful enough that you're doomed to defeat if you try to fight it.

Is it a DTO or a Value Object?

A common misunderstanding in my workshops (well, whose fault is it then? ;)), is about the distinction between a DTO and a value object. And so I've been looking for a way to categorize these objects without mistake.

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5 Constant Lists That Give Context to your Integers and Strings

Enum i a great feature of modern software development. Here you will find five lists that lives in Enums (or Enum-like) that add lots of context for your code. It will look better and cleaner.

Validate all the things: improve your security with input validation!

If there's one habit that can make software more secure, it's probably input validation. Here's how to apply OWASP Proactive Control C5 (Validate All Inputs) to your code.

TypeScript Utility Types: The 6 Most Useful

Write better typescript code by using typescript utility types. Record, Partial, Required, Omit, Pick, Exclude utilities.

Query parameter data types and performance

Recently, I could help solve a “mysterious” performance problem for a customer. The problem turned out to be a badly chosen query parameter type, which led to poor query performance. After working on this customer’s case, I realized that the meaning of the data type of a query parameter is not universally understood, which is why I decided to write this article.

Terraform Best Practices

Building Serverless Applications That Scale The Perfect Amount

Great reasoning about how to think about the architecture that scale on Serverless, thinking about the load and costs.

Run a PHP application on AWS Fargate

An example for a pipeline to configure and deploy a PHP application on AWS Fargate.

6 Signs Your Daily Standups Aren’t Working

Architecture Decision Records help you, your team, and future teams

Decisions are made everyday and often the number of daily decisions make us forget older ones. Keeping a record of the decisions is a great tool to revisit what was done and also be more confident that a change can be made, when a previous statement become obsolete somehow. ADRs are a great tool for a mature software.

Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Add support for MERGE SQL command

MERGE SQL commands is able to perform INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE based on a base query and some conditions. This is very useful for some business logic that can be applied directly on the database data.

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The Missing Guide to AWS API Gateway Access Logs

In this post, we’re continuing the deep dive on API Gateway. Here, we’ll be looking at API Gateway access logging. Access logging can save your bacon when debugging a gnarly API Gateway issue, but you need to understand some nuance before you can use it correctly. We’ll dig into the details here so that you’ll be logging like Paul Bunyan in no time.

Ready for changes with Hexagonal Architecture

Netflix considerations related to the decisions of using Hexagonal Architecture

OAuth Patterns and Anti-Patterns RefCard

Modern, more secure recommendations continue to replace some of OAuth's original elements as the protocol evolves. Securing access to APIs and other resources and data effectively under OAuth 2.0 requires first learning the components and tools it involves.

Can auto_explain (with timing) have low overhead?

Some benchmarks for use of auto_explain. It seems great to be enabled on production.

Here we’ll be looking into the overhead of auto_explain. Many places warn about its overhead, but I’ve found concrete information difficult to come by.

Setting up SSL authentication for PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a secure database and we want to keep it that way. It makes sense, then, to consider SSL to encrypt the connection between client and server. This posting will help you to set up SSL authentication for PostgreSQL properly, and hopefully also to understand some background information to make your database more secure.