Developer Challenges of Serverless and AWS Lambda

AWS pioneered the idea behind serverless when they introduced AWS Lambda: focus on your business logic down to its atomic parts of your applications — functions — and let them worry about the rest. This whole idea eventually led to the NoOps movement.

Serverless is a great idea! It’s a new paradigm that can be applied to how modern applications are developed and run in the cloud to drastically increase developer focus and productivity.

But there are challenges and even “gotchas”…

1. kitchen sink — As with any new technology, developers want to utilize it for every use case imaginable. We call this “shiny object syndrome,” and this leads to a lot of misunderstanding of best practices for when to use serverless functions
2. killer latency — There’s a cost to spinning up and spinning down the underlying containers that run serverless functions. This latency can be very prohibitive, depending on your use case.
3. vendor lock-in — Relying on a single cloud provider’s serverless solution means investing a lot of time and money in a technology that isn’t portable should your needs change in the future.
4. no on-premises equivalent — While several attempts have been made to bring serverless to the on-premises data center, they are often cumbersome, difficult to maintain, and incompatible with cloud-based solutions.
5. per-cloud duplication — Even if you find a way to adopt multiple serverless implementations, it’s at the cost of non-uniformity and duplication

Truth About The Costs And Pricing Behind AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway

When you start with two completely different products and try to integrate them together, you’re often left with a diluted experience and a compromise on functionality.

That’s exactly the case for AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.

If you want to trigger AWS Lambda functions from HTTP requests, AWS forces you to use Amazon API Gateway, a consideration and constraint for all Web-based use cases.

The real cost of utilizing AWS Lambda for Web-based use cases is not AWS Lambda itself; it’s exposing Lambda functions through Amazon API Gateway.

A lot of articles have been written about this and other challenges utilizing Lambda. Here are a few…

• Amiram Shachar’s Medium article
• Sumit Maingi’s traffic cost analysis of serverless
• Viacom’s Lambda cost and functionality tradeoffs

High-Performance Experience, Same AWS.

We saw these challenges and worked with companies that either wanted a better experience or needed a true multi-cloud solution.

We took the idea behind serverless and ran with it by providing a seamless experience on top of AWS with Express Serverless Platform.

It gives developers a better way to write and orchestrate serverless functions. It eliminates hidden costs and gives complete control of API Management with a much better API gateway experience.

The adoption of Express Serverless Platform means you can also fulfill a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy by writing functions once and running them anywhere, including your own data center, with the same efficiency and experience.

How Express Serverless Platform Lets Developers Have Their Serverless and Kubernetes Cake and Eat it Too

Express Serverless Platform installs and runs on your AWS account in Kubernetes. You don’t have to manage Kubernetes, because EKS on AWS does that for you.

The installer provisions a Kubernetes cluster on EKS. Once Kubernetes is up and running, Express Serverless Platform is installed into Kubernetes through Helm.

The following components are deployed as microservices running in Kubernetes pods through Express Serverless Platform:

• model functions
• serverless functions
• integrations (connectors)
• API Gateways

Express Serverless Platform is the only platform that seamlessly lets you write functions and run them in public cloud infrastructure or opt to use long-running containers in a managed Kubernetes cluster.

Instead of being forced to wire up AWS Lambda functions to Amazon API Gateway, you can wire them up to Express Gateway and have a much better starting point with built-in policies and enterprise features out-of-the-box.

You may read and download our complete and in-depth guide towards understanding the major differences and similarities between Express Serverless Platform on AWS versus AWS Lambda across multiple dimensions, including features and pricing, here.

We hope you found this post beneficial. Our upcoming posts will explore actual real-life use cases and implementations of Express Serverless Platform in various situations and industries.

If you’re interested in more of these topics, join the live discussion on Twitter (@lunchbadger) or (@express_gateway).

Developer Challenges of Serverless and AWS Lambda was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.