Yan Cui is making the AppSync Masterclass's Threads

Yan Cui is making the ...
@theburningmonk

If you missed @clare_liguori's Continuous Delivery session this week (like I did) then good news, it's available on-demand now 🎊

https://t.co/78b8sI2hHs

And here's my play-by-play for the session

🧵...

This is a typical CD pipeline in AWS.

This is far more complex than the most complex CD pipeline I have ever had! Just cos it's complex, doesn't mean it's over-engineered though. Given the blast radius, I'm glad they do releases carefully and safely.

If you look closely, beyond all the alpha, beta, gamma environments, it's one-box in a region first then the rest of the region, I assume starting with the least risky regions first.

For anyone thinking about going multi-region (after the recent Kinesis outage), this is one of the complexities you need to consider. To do multi-region right and deploy safely (minimize blast radius), this is one of the complexities you have to factor in.

This "deploy small at first then more broadly" principle applies to #serverless apps too, though you can't "deploy to one box". You can do it with canary deployments instead, CodeDeploy supports this practice for Lambda (using weighted aliases) out-of-the-box.

Yan Cui is making the ...
@theburningmonk

I've gotten a few questions about Aurora Serverless v2 preview, so here's what I've learnt so far. Please feel free to chime in if I've missed anything important or got any of the facts wrong.

Alright, here goes the 🧵...

Q: does it replace the existing Aurora Serverless offering?
A: no, it lives side-by-side with the existing Aurora Serverless, which will still be available to you as "v1".

Q: Aurora Serverless v1 takes a few seconds to scale up, that's too much for our use case where we get a lot of spikes. Is that the same with v2?
A: no, v2 scales up in milliseconds, during preview the max ACU is only 32 though

Q: is the cold start for Aurora Serverless v2 still a few seconds?
A: yes, unfortunately...
Q: so if you want to avoid cold starts, what's the minimum ACU you have to run?
A: minimum ACU with v2 is 0.5

Q: does v2 still scale up in double increments, e.g. 4 ACU -> 8 ACU?
A: no, it scales up in increments of 0.5 ACUs, so it's a much tighter fit for your workload, so you'll waste less money on over-provisioned ACUs

Yan Cui is making the ...
@theburningmonk

Great session by @MarcJBrooker earlier on building technology standards at Amazon scale, and some interesting tidbits about the secret sauce behind Lambda and how they make technology choices - e.g. in whether to use Rust for the stateful load balancer v2 for Lambda.

🧵

Nice shout out to some of the benefits of Rust - no GC (good for p99+ percentile latency), memory safety with its ownership system https://t.co/2ShIC786S5 great support for multi-threading (which still works with the ownership system)

And why not to use Rust.

The interesting Q is how to balance technical strengths vs weaknesses that are more organizational.

And it all boils down to this..

which is basically the same question that organizations all over the world have to answer when they consider adopting #serverless technologies like Lambda.

And I love Marc's answer - to innovate (ie. try new things) with guard rails that mitigate the risks.

As a consultant, I often find myself being one of those guard rails for organizations that want to adopt #Serverless

(nice plug, self hi-five! ✋)

Authors Yan Cui is making the AppSync Masterclass