Episode #61: The Well-Architected Serverless Lens with Heitor Lessa

About Heitor Lessa

Heitor Lessa is a Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He has spent the last 10 years in a number of roles, focusing on networking, infrastructure, and development. Since joining AWS in 2013, he’s been helping organizations of all sizes and segments across EMEA to design cloud native applications as well as software development best practices.

• Twitter: twitter.com/heitor_lessa
• Email: [email protected]
• Serverless Application Lens Whitepaper: d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Serverless-Applications-Lens.pdf

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bFjT3TrpbZg

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm speaking with Heitor Lessa. Hey Heitor, thanks for joining me.

Heitor: Thanks for inviting me. It is a pleasure to be here.

Jeremy: I'm super excited to have you here. You are a principal specialist solutions architect at Amazon Web Services. Why don't you tell the listeners what you do at Amazon Web Services and sort of what a principal specialist solutions architect does.

Heitor: I know it's a long title. I guess we can just say I'm a solutions architect at AWS. My day to day is basically working with customers and enable developer teams to find the best solutions on how to either build something on AWS or migrate, let's say a microservices monolith to a microservices or optimize something that they have.

But more recently, I'm also working with customers to help them build developer communities' inside. Similar to what we have at Amazon which bring in pros and stuff like that.

Jeremy: Very cool. Now I know you're doing a million different things. I don't know how you're not running AWS yet. I think you're next in line, I think. But you're doing a million things there. And one of the things though that you've been working on in the past and I know you're still involved with it, is the Well-Architected Serverless Lens. And I want to get into this because this is one of those things where if you're trying to find best practices and you're reading all these blog posts and you're looking at anti-patterns and good patterns and all this kind of stuff, I think it gets really, really confusing.

And your team and a bunch of other people at AWS and a bunch of the community heroes and all kinds of people got together and put together this Serverless Lens. If people are familiar with the Well-Architected Framework, which is talked about quite a bit, there's also this thing called the Well-Architected Serverless Lens. What's the difference between those two things?

Heitor: Sure. So the Well-Architected started way back in 2016, even before that to be fairly honest, where customers were looking to use AWS but we have roughly 50 services back then. Compared to today we have a lot more. And basically those customers were asking, "How do I use X service versus the other service? How do I go to production with this critical application? How do I model from my on-premises applications to something more cloud native? How do I migrate?" And things like this. Or even specific questions like, "How do I set up a multi-account? How do I better protect my accounts from a security perspective or billing?"

Well-Architected brings all those best practices that are agnostic from a workload perspective that typically applies to many of them, whether using serverless or containers, so usually what would work really well. But the challenge of Well-Architected as the platform evolved, we started to have more high level services like serverless or some service like AI/ML, which you have to treat them slightly different. The best practices still apply on how you set up AWS accounts, how do you do backups, how do you think about relational databases versus NoSQL databases?

But when you get to things like Multi-AZ and EBS volumes for serverless, they don't quite make sense. The Lens was a project to say, what are the customers using that Well-Architected actually helped them but they still lack a lot of good practices that are very specific to the technology they chose? So serverless was one of them. IoT was also another one. And more recently, last month we also announced Analytics Lens. If you're interested in big data, AI, those pieces, Analytics covered that pretty well. That's the difference.

The Lens is a... It doesn't replace, Well-Architected, it's more as an add on to the all these best practices we've been sharing for the past few years.

Jeremy: Yeah, because as an add on, it makes sense. The original serverless or sorry, the original Well-Architected Framework has, I think, 47 questions or so that asked you about specific areas and there's the five pillars and we'll get into some of that because I do think it's interesting to think of it that way. But the Serverless Lens just has more questions. What's the reason for all those extra questions?

Heitor: Sure. Well-Architected, when we started the Lens, if I'm not mistaken, again, there was the 47 questions but now we had just a recent update where some of those questions might change now. But the Serverless Lens, I think, if I'm not mistaken, we started with 31 questions because we were trying to get every single detail of servers and every best practice. But that was primarily a academic paper. So Lens started as a let's set up a document where you can go and find out when do I use serverless, is serverless as a good thing for me? How do I choose between all these services? How do I know the operational best practices for serverless?

As we started digging into those best practices, we felt we needed a lot more questions to dive into, okay, what type of metrics do you need? What type of alarm do you need? When do you use containers versus Lambda functions? When do you use orchestration versus synchronous calls? We only started in 2017. We had all these questions that customers were asking us. We put together into a document and we started writing. That took us roughly six to 10 months to put together into 50 pages when we announced Serverless Lens.

Jeremy: Right. And then that was a white paper, like you said. That was just a document. But now that's been moved into the Well-Architected tool, which is pretty cool. If anyone's used that or hasn't, I suggest you go and try it out. But that just takes you through and asks you all those questions and you can kind of keep track of your progress. How did you go from the white paper to the tool?

Heitor: Yeah. In 2017, when we announced, Werner went on the stage and talked about this idea of getting those best practices for serverless. And in 2018, we got an immense amount of downloads for Lens. If I'm not mistaken, it was over 20,000 downloads in less than six months, specifically for serverless best practices.

But then those questions started to ask more. How about Alexa? How about X, Y, Z? So what we found was trying to keep writing those pieces into the document was pretty difficult to keep up with the serverless space as well and how much it changes. What we found was instead of keep adding more questions and more pages of documents, we came together and thought, what if we evolved the lens project into the console? The customer would go to the console and say, "I want to review my architec...