Three Technologies from the Most Recent Thoughtworks Technology Radar which can have big impact on Serverless
👋 I am Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, in every newsletter, I will share articles about serverless technologies on AWS. If you like to have more posts like this consider subscribing!
The latest edition of the Thoughtworks TechRadar has just been released, teeming with innovative technologies. In this newsletter, I'll highlight three standout technologies from the radar that I believe are poised to make a significant impact in serverless eco system.
CloudEvents - (Platform/Adopt) - Events are often the main term in serverless architecture. An event contains information about some occurrence which is then passed along amongst different components. The lack of standards in defining event format means consumers need to be aware of the format to parse the event. CloudEvent aims to standardize an Event format. This will bring interoperability among different systems. It is part of now CNCF. Proposing an event format is one part of the equation and making it compatible with cloud vendors is another important aspect. This is where CloudEvents shines. It is already supported by AWS EventBridge and Oracle Cloud to name a few.
The challenge will remain for organizations to adopt CloudEvents where they already have an internal event structure in place.
Before progressing to the next two items I would like to take a leaf out of “The Frugal Architect” manifesto where Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels talks about laws of making cost-aware, sustainable, and modern architectures. Law VI(Cost Optimization is Incremental) talks about constantly monitoring and challenging the choice of technology to become more cost-efficient.
Here is The complete talk is from AWS: Reinvent 2023
in pursuit of making our serverless workload more cost-effective, I choose the below technologies from the radar -
ARM In The Cloud (Platform/Trial) - This blip talks about using ARM-based workload on the cloud for better cost/performance. As we see in lambda, ARM-based AWS Graviton processors have been available for quite a while now. This promises a much better cost-to-performance ratio. AWS Lambda also supports arm64-based architecture promising better price and performance. Lambda document recommends Graviton for CPU-intensive workloads.
The ecosystem of third-party libraries has also evolved to support arm64-based processors.
The promise of better price and performance becomes even more critical for lambda as it is billed with duration and memory consumed. we can see the AWS Blog post that claims up to 34% price performance benefits.
The only scenario that might hinder your migration to Graviton-powered Lambda
if some dependencies are not yet adopted arm64.
Cargo Lambda (Tools/Assess)- Rust is gaining popularity and Cargo lambda makes it easy to build, deploy, and run Rust-based AWS Lambda easily. As Rust lambda promises fast startup time this will also contribute to the cost frugality that we saw in the Frugal Architect. However, it is tough to overnight move lambdas to a new language. But worth giving a try for new greenfield projects.
I selected these three technologies due to their potential for immediate and significant impact in the realm of serverless computing. Will keep an eye on how the adoption of ARM-based lambda and Rust for AWS progress through radar.
Some interesting readings
The Frugal Architect - As organizations look to cut cost on their cloud costs these laws guide architects to make architecture cost-effective.
Building Well-Architected API Gateway APIs - I often find API gateway with so many configurations confusing, this discussion points us towards effectively using API Gateway features like caching, metrics, logging and especially authorization.