Episode #17: Building Serverless Apps Using Architect with Brian LeRoux

About Brian Leroux

Brian LeRoux is currently building a continuous delivery vehicle for cloud functions called begin.com on an open source foundation called arc.codes. Previously he worked at Adobe on PhoneGap and Apache Cordova. Brian believes the future will be writ as functions, seamlessly running in the cloud, agnostic of vendors, on an open source platform and it will be stewarded by hackers like you.

• Architect Framework: arc.codes
• Twitter: @brianleroux
• Begin: begin.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/brianleroux

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Brian LeRoux. Hey, Brian. Thanks for joining me.

Brian: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Jeremy: So you are the Co-Founder and CTO at Begin. So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what Begin does.

Brian: Yeah. Cool. So, I'm Brian. I’m a Webby hacker. I guess you could say I've been building software for a really, really long time now, and my focus has been, in the last few years, the cloud. In a previous life, I used to work in the mobile space quite a bit and Begin.com is continuous integration and delivery for serverless applications — modern serverless applications.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, so I wanted to have you on today to talk about the Architect Framework. So this has been out there for quite some time, but just in case people aren't familiar with what it is, maybe you could just tell listeners what the Architect Framework is all about and what you can build with it.

Brian: Yeah, Architect is a serverless framework. It papers over some of the more complex bits of getting up and running with a serverless application. It's sometimes accused of being pretty opinionated, but I think maybe we'll dig into that a bit in this episode and how maybe it's not so much opinionated, just, you know, makes some choices up front for you and saves you time. It's much more convention than it is configuration. And it's really targeted at building super fast web apps.

Jeremy: So let's get into that. So first of all, why did you build this? Because there's Claudia.js and there’s Sam, and there’s Serverless Framework, and there’s — you name it, there's a framework out there that helps you build serverless applications. So what was the reasoning behind it?

Brian: We never actually set out to build a framework. In 2014, I left my role at Adobe. I used to work on the PhoneGap in Cordova projects. And a big part of that was this thing called PhoneGap Build, which is a hosted service that’s part of the Creative Cloud where you can upload HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and we spit out native iOS and Android apps. And building for Creative Cloud and building a big load-balanced rails application taught me a lot of lessons. One of those lessons was: I'd never want to do that again. And when I came out the other side, Ryan Block and I started the first iteration of Begin, which was a Slackbot, and we didn't really know a whole lot about what we were going to be building or how we were going to be building it. But we knew what we didn't want to do. And what we didn't want to do was take on a traditional load-balanced, monolithic architecture. And this new serverless thing was around and it looked like this was the future. It was 2014 at this time. Lambda was new, but there was no way to do an HTTP call. And then that August, API Gateway was released and I was floored personally. I saw it, and I was like, that's it. It's just got to be the future. So we built the first iteration of Begin, which was a Slackbot, and it had really strong real-time requirements, because it was a bot and had a web app component to it. And at that time, there was only one framework. It was called JAWS and it really was early days. So we built our own thing, but we built a product. We didn't build Architect per se. That project didn't work out, but we extracted Architect afterwards to build our second thing, and we knew we were onto something because, very similar to the Basecamp story, we didn't try and create a framework. We built a thing, and in the process of building that thing, we came up with something that looks a little bit different. When you look at Architect, it's not the same as other frameworks because we weren't trying to build a framework. We're trying to build a product.

Jeremy: And I think that's actually kind of typical of building serverless applications. I know as I started building serverless, as I was working on my first few serverless applications, I built the Lambda API web framework, right, because I just needed a better way to process API Gateway calls using the Lambda proxy integrations. And then,I built the Serverless-MySQL package to deal with the max connections issue. And you start building these components to help you build the products that you want to build, and eventually, you get some really cool tools that come out of it. And that's basically what you did with Architect, and you’ve made that open source, right?

Brian: Yeah. We donated it to the, at that time it was called the JS Foundation. But the JS Foundation, and the Node.js Foundation merged and became the OpenJS Foundation. I've got a pretty long history in open source, and I really believe in foundation-backed governance for projects. And so it was important to me to pull that IP out of a privately-held, venture-backed startup and put it into a place where the commons could contribute back to it. And just as a note, so the listeners understand, I'm not a zero sum thinker. There's going to be more than one framework. Technology tends to be additive, and there's going to be different things that we could learn from each other and build on from each other. So by all means, check out Architect, but, you know, if you're a Python hacker, you would be remiss not to check out Chalice. And if you're deep into AWS, you're probably already using Sam, and I think that's just fine. That makes sense to me.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, so let's talk about this opinionated thing because when I first saw this — it is kind of funny — but when I first saw the Architect Framework, I was looking through it, and I'm like, okay, this seems like it is built for solving a very specific problem. And again, I know it can be extended and you've got other things we can talk about, like some of your macros and things that you can build on top of it, but it just seemed very opinionated to me, in the sense that you were enforcing small file sizes, single purpose Lambda functions, that kind of stuff. So what are your thoughts on that? Because you maybe don't think it's so opinionated, right?

Brian: I didn't and Yan Cui from the Burning Monk wrote an awesome blog post where he threw Architect way up in the opinionated corner. And when we first saw it were like, “Oh, weird. Okay.” So we do look different and we do look like we have opinions, but I think most people will share those opinions. So one of our opinions is that we need to be really fast. And we need to be faster both author time and at runtime. So by author time speed, I mean, we need deploy iterations and lead time to production to be really quick. Monolithic apps have pretty poor characteristics for this. They tend to be deployed in minutes to hours, if not days or weeks, whereas serverless a...