Experiences of using serverless microservices on video publishing platform
Pauli Huhtiniemi · LUTPub (LUT University) · 2019
This thesis presents concepts of microservices and serverless computing. Subsequently, a video on demand service is used as a case study and various examples of serverless microservices are presented and experiences of building them are discussed. First goal is to study the literature and then discuss real life experiences of building serverless microservices and see if it frees time from infrastructure management to building business logic while saving money on hosting costs. Second goal is to gather information on suitable use cases for serverless approach as of today. Microservices are small, autonomous and independently deployable services that work together using message-based communication in a highly automated infrastructure. Serverless computing refers to concept of developing applications built with functions and backend as a service components whose usage is invoiced based on actual execution times. These applications are deployed to infrastructure fully managed by a cloud vendor and thus there's no need to manage servers by a cloud user. While considerable amount of effort is still needed for defining cloud resources with infrastructure as code process, serverless approach was found to be beneficial as it allowed teams to focus on business logic instead of challenges like capacity planning, auto-scaling and high-availability. Cost savings were discovered, but mostly because of more efficient development time was possible. Serverless is a good option for services where really low latency isn’t required and things like high-throughput and time-to-market are important.