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You can’t pick a technical direction without considering the business implications. Mat Ellis, Founder/CEO of Cloudability, in a recent CloudCast episode, makes the business case for Serverless. The argument goes something like: Enterprises know they can’t run services cheaper than Amazon. Even if the cost is 2x the extra agility of the cloud is often worth the multiple. So enterprises are moving to the cloud. Moving to the cloud is a move to services. How do you build services now? Using Serverless. With services businesses use a familiar cost per unit billing model, they can think of paying for services as a cost per database query, cost per terabyte of data, and so on. Since employees are no longer managing[…]

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has re-architected a margin optimisation application to run in AWS, and in doing so forged a template for what it can and cannot take to the cloud in future. ASX’s general manager of application development and DevOps, Katherine Squire, said the application had been re-architected to run in the cloud to fix performance issues. Squire will present at Cloud & DC Edge on the Gold Coast next month, which is co-organised by iTnews. The ASX’s margin optimisation service automatically identifies and executes opportunities to reduce ASX Cleared derivatives margin costs for members and their clients. The new margin optimisation application went live this week. Squire said the application was re-engineered to make it ‘cloud fit’,[…]

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I’m interested in serverless computing and as I write Swift, the OpenWhisk platform comes up high when you Google. This turns out to be a really good choice as OpenWhisk is Open Source so I can read the source code (and have done!). In principle, I can also run my own instance of it if I need to to for regulatory reasons, or just to avoid vendor lock-in. Commercially, the whole point of Serverless (aka Functions as a Service) is that it deal with everything infrastructure related other than the function I am writing, and so I actually host my OpenWhisk functions with IBM’s Bluemix. Source: Serverless Swift on OpenWhisk – OpenWhisk – Medium

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Key Takeaways Serverless compute, or Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), will be transformational in our industry – organizations that embrace it will have a competitive advantage because of the cost, labor and time-to-market advantages it brings Many Serverless applications will combine FaaS functions with significant use of other vendor-provided services that provide pre-managed functionality and state management Tooling will significantly improve, especially in the area of deployment and configuration Patterns of good Serverless architecture will emerge – it’s too soon to know what they are now Organizations will need to embrace the ideas of ‘true’ DevOps and autonomous, self-sufficient, product teams to reap the full time-to-market benefits that Serverless can offer Source: The Future of Serverless Compute

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You can now monitor and track the time that records spend in Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB streams before being processed by your AWS Lambda functions. Using the new IteratorAge metric, you can easily detect delays in stream processing and create alarms that help you efficiently monitor your stream-based operation’s health and performance. The IteratorAge metric is now available as a default metric which is free of charge. It is viewable in the Lambda console’s monitoring tab. Source: AWS Lambda Adds Enhanced Visibility into Stream-based Processing Operations

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For a couple of decades, we’ve known about SaaS (Software as a Service.)  And more recently companies like Rackspace.com have driven PaaS (Platform as a Service.) (There is also BaaS…) The cloud beckons to businesses, trying to reduce and secure enterprise architectures. So what’s new in all of that? Enter FaaS – which is “Function as a Service.” Since 2012 or so, Amazon Web Services has been leading the way, Google Hosted Services is catching up. And Microsoft is pushing Azure aggressively. Source: FaaS – Getting Used to the Cloud Enterprise – Web Presence Consulting

Last week I blogged about my first experience working with OpenWhisk triggers and rules, specifically the Cron trigger which lets you execute actions according to a schedule. Today I’m sharing another example, which, while not as complex as the 911 scraper, I thought was kind of fun. Source: Another OpenWhisk Cron Example – the Blog Nag · Raymond Camden

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Note: I am rebranding Serverless as Server-less in a brilliant thought leadership move :). You do the same if you want to be seen as cool etc… I remain a proponent of server-less and believe that it is a big change in how applications will get built. Server-less offers business and technical benefits. Its ideally suited for new workloads. Ignore the vendor lock-in concerns if you want to innovate. Lets review some of the benefits of server-less: – Frees up app developers from infrastructure concerns – App developers focus on business logic, less need for rockstar /ninja/fullstack engineers — Business pays for exactly what they consume – Business spend is proportional to business growth – Get away from instance based pricing,[…]