Episode #70: A Typical Serverless Architecture with Xavier Lefevre

About Xavier Lefèvre

Xavier Lefevre is currently VP of Engineering at Theodo, a web development and product consulting agency. As part of his role, Xavier manages five technical teams and leads the development of the company’s serverless expertise. He believes that serverless is a major breakthrough that will allow the industry to redirect its focus on core business needs, and his specialization centers on serverless and problematic FinOps architectures. Xavier shares his expertise through articles such as with Serverless Transformation on Medium, and various speaking events, including Virtual Serverless London meetup.

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/xavi_lefevre
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lefevrexavier/
• Medium Blog: https://medium.com/@xavierlefevre
• What a typical 100% Serverless Architecture looks like in AWS!
• Serverless Cost Calculator

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/pKc2f8Q0PQI

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I am chatting with Xavier Lefevre, who I am going to have re-pronounce his name afterwards. Hey Xavier, thanks for joining me.

Xavier: Thank you. Thank you for having me. My name is Xavier Lefevre in French, which is not very easy to say.

Jeremy: So you are the VP of engineering at Theodo. I'd love it if you can tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Theodo.

Xavier: Yes, so I'm going to start with Theodo. Theodo is a product consulting and development agency, so we work with clients of any sizes, companies of any sizes, to build websites and complete web applications for them for different kinds of use cases. So, it can be a big company, it can be a small company, it can be eCommerce, it can be a big industry, anything. We are in France, UK and U.S.A., London and New York to be exact. And we're doing several different types of web ports, so we do mobile, we do infrastructure, that's something that could be interesting, like Kubernetes a lot, and stuff like that, so that's Theodo.

And for me, so I'm a VP engineering of Theodo in France, at Paris. And I have a fun background. So, I went to business school when I was younger and I did business school, but I always wanted to work in tech and when I got out I started to work in tech, but as a business role. I realized what it meant to work in tech and the different roles. And I finally realized that I preferred to be in tech myself, so that's why I'm here today.

Jeremy: Awesome. So, you are a bit infamous now, you have this article that you wrote called, the Typical Serverless Architecture, which got a lot of praise and also got a lot of criticism from people who don't quite understand serverless architecture. So, I would love it, just to go through ... and we'll start with this, there's other things I want to get to, but let's start with that, let's start with this typical serverless architecture. Take us back, what does that look like?

Xavier: So, from experience, and I don't have ... I have a year of experience in serverless, so I'm still, compared to you, I'm still young. But from experience, I started to of course dig into serverless and understand a little bit everything that's included in the technology. And I wanted to show this big picture and this big idea of what the typical architecture is. So, what can you find inside? You can find ... So, we go through each box. Okay? I can talk about the origin as well, which can be interesting. Which one do you prefer first?

Jeremy: Well, so I have them listed here, so let's start with the front end, what does the front end look like in a serverless application?

Xavier: So let's do that. So, front end itself, your front end is going to be a FGA, for instance, like Drax, it can be Next for instance, with SSR. What you can find there are two things that are specific to servers, the first is AWS Amplify, which does a lot of stuff, but among which you can find many components in there that help you work faster. And you can find STKs that help you communicate more easily and find pre-made features with AWS services, like Cognito for instance. You can authorize your users and handle your users directly from your front end thanks to AWS Amplify, so that's one piece you can find. The other one is ... if I go a little bit further, when you host your front end. So, you have two steps, first the basic one, if it's a static React you just have to host static files with your JS that's going to be loaded on your product and that's going to run, we know how it works.

So, there you're going to use F3, it's going to be exposed by your CloudFront, and that's it. If you want to go further, which happens a lot lately, even more because it's partial, if you want to go into SSR or SSG or a bit both, that you can do with Next for instance. Here you can use ... you can take for instance Lambda at Edge, which are Lambdas that are inside of CloudFront, that run close to the users, that are super, super, super fast and that can take care of generating your pages for itself, for you, for performance purposes or SU purposes. So that's one capacity in terms of front-end servers.

Jeremy: All right. So, now you've got your front end and you've got it hosted either in CloudFront or maybe even Amplify Console, which is different than Amplify, you can host SSGs there as well, and things like that. So, what about for domains and certificates, how do you manage your domain names and your certificates in a typical serverless architecture?

Xavier: Okay. So, there are two services that are quite famous as well in AWS, you're going to have certificate managers that's going to help you deal with your certificates, HTPS, and you're going to have Route 53 that's going to help you deal with your domains. They play directly, easily with the rest of your serverless architecture and you don't have much else to do. And we're talking ... something interesting as well, we're talking a lot about AWS, because it needs those services and from experience we found the serverless experience more, let's say more fit and more complete in AWS, but of course you can do this kind of stuff in other providers.

Jeremy: All right. So, now we've got all this stuff set up, this is our front end, now we actually want to be able to process APIs, so how do we build out our business APIs?

Xavier: Okay. So, there you have two choices, first about the routes you want to expose through the API, you have API Gateway, even more complicated, you have two API gateways, the View 1 NTP2, which are not named the View 1NTP2, not easy, and you have AppSync on the other side. Okay? So, if the API Gateway is about making REST APIs, AppSync is about making GraphQL APIs, mainly, if I have to just recap really fast. Of course, they have a lot of capacities inside, one API Gateway has an option to use API Gateway WebSocket, for instance to do realtime AppSync as embedded GraphQL substations, with pros and cons. So, we have those two, depending on what you want to do, REST or GraphQL. Okay...