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Tag: lambda

  • Is AWS Cloud Per-Second Billing Boon or Bane for DevOps Engineers?

    Is AWS Cloud Per-Second Billing Boon or Bane for DevOps Engineers?

    Amazon’s introduction of its AWS services in 2006 with a per-hour billing model for compute resources was a game-changer for the IT world. Since then, AWS has taken over the cloud computing market as a leader, while broadening the range of cloud services offered every year. However, the per-hour billing business model was one of the major issues for many customers—in particular, those who had applications using EC2 for only minutes at a time.

    Recently, AWS announced support for per-second billing of its EC2 service, addressing the aforementioned concerns. Of course, this also created controversy among the per-hour supporters. While I won’t get into the pros and cons across the whole enterprise, one group in particular is affected from the new per-second model: DevOps engineers.

    Here are the top five implications for DevOps teams as a result of per-second billing:

    Autoscale without worrying about cost

    Most engineers were vary of autoscaling at will, mostly because of EC2’s hourly charges even though they might need additional compute capacity for just 15 minutes. With per-second billing, DevOps engineers don’t have to worry—it’s as simple as scaling your EC2 instance as you need to, and when you need to.

    No more custom logic for hourly batches

    Many customers use EC2 for jobs and batch processing purposes. Due to the hourly pricing, engineers have written custom logic to benchmark and constantly tune the number of nodes in their batch clusters to ensure they are cost-optimized. Per-second billing frees up headaches for DevOps engineers that are using EC2 for batch processing and job clusters.

    The need to speed up EC2 launches

    With per-second billing, it’s important to take advantage of prebaked Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for launching your EC2 instances, instead of complete configuration setup on every instance launch. This will reduce the costs for you, by saving anywhere from five to 15 minutes. It’s time to create prebaked AMIs for faster instance launches, ultimately saving costs.

    Dilemma of Lambda or EC2

    Be prepared to compare whether to use Lambda or EC2 for new workloads and applications more often than you are used to. Your benchmarking between Lambda and EC2 has become a little more dicey. The serverless lambda just got competition from EC2 again.

    Your big data just got easier

    With EMR also supporting per-second billing, your job has become a lot easier. As a , you no longer need to constantly benchmark your EMR clusters for number of nodes and job processing times to be optimized for per-hour billing.

    DevOps engineers have a lot to benefit from per-hour billing, but also much to consider when it comes to time-to-deployment and choosing a compute service. Now is the the time for DevOps engineers engineers to bring these concerns to their CIOs to make a smooth transition to the new AWS business model.

    About the Author / Vijay Rayapati

    Vijay Rayapati, CEO of cloud management platform company Botmetric, identifies himself as a technology entrepreneur, passionate about creating products, building high-performance teams, and solutions that solve real-world business issues. Vijay is a popular speaker in India and the US, and has co-authored a popular book, “Learning Big Data.” Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • All Day DevOps: Taking Lambda to the Max

    All Day DevOps: Taking Lambda to the Max

    Lambda is the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet, and it is also the name of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) service that lets you run code without actually configuring a server. Amazon chose the name Lambda because—well, okay, I have no idea. Comment here if you know.

    Thankfully, you don’t need to know that to understand how to utilize Lambda. Matt Williams, DevOps Evangelist at Datadog (@technovangelist), outlined how to set up AWS Lambda at the 2016 All Day DevOps conference in his talk titled, “Hold the Infrastructure: Getting the Most Out of Lambda.”

    First, to understand what Lambda is, we must look at the evolution of servers.

    williams1.png

    We started with physical boxes—we had to buy and maintain these boxes, and no matter how much we used, we had to pay for all of it. We then evolved to multiple virtual machines on a physical server so that we could maximize the resources of physical boxes. Now, AWS and similar cloud services are common. We create a virtual machine that we need, and the service provider maintains the physical servers. We also have containers to keep environments identical across machines and, finally, we arrive at Lambda, which is service that runs code but doesn’t require you to set up the server. It takes care of all of that automatically, and you only pay for the time that the function is actually running. So, if your function takes 500ms to run, you pay for 500ms to run it once.

    Lambda is trigger-based. When it receives a trigger, it executes a specified function. The trigger can be a variety of actions with AWS services, such as when a file shows up on S3 or an Alexa skill is requested.

    Lambda is serverless, as far as you are concerned.

    Lambda is stateless. This means you can’t rely on local states, so, if you need to retain information between function calls, you have to save that data somewhere else.

    Lambda executes functions. Each function:

    • Is code in a container on LXC on AMZN Linux
    • Does not have restrictions on what it can do
    • Is priced based on exec time, quantity and memory

    Lambda links to various AWS services, such as:

    • Files (S3)
    • Database Updates (DynamoDB)
    • Streams (Kinesis)
    • Messages (SNS, SES)
    • IoT (Echo, API Gateway)

    Matt mentioned several good use cases, such as bootstrapping (the first 1M requests per month are free), cron jobs, file manipulation, API translation, social media stream processing, scaling infrastructure, mobile/IoT backends and Alexa skills, to name a few.

    He also mentioned three specific examples to explore:

    Matt then outlined how you can get started and noted that setup is simple as long as you think of application development as simple (write the code, set up on AWS, and debug). He walked through a specific example of automatically resizing images on S3 when they are added. You can watch his full presentation with screenshots here.

    Matt also provided a list of some AWS Lambda Tools:

    Matt rounded out his 30-minute presentation with a discussion regarding the need for monitoring and how to use Lambda for monitoring.

    You can watch Matt’s entire talk online here, where you can dig deeper into this subject. If you missed any of the other 30-minute presentations from All Day DevOps, they are easy to find and available free-of-charge here.  Finally, be sure to register you and the rest of your team for the 2017 All Day DevOps conference here.  This year’s event will offer 96 practitioner-led sessions (no vendor pitches allowed). It’s all free and online Oct. 24.

    — Derek E. Weeks