DEV Community

Minimum Viable Product Rollout with ReactJS and Serverless Architecture

Chinmay Joshi on July 12, 2018

Recently, I joined a new organisation, Supahands! As my first assignment, I was supposed to assess a few front-end frameworks for one of our produc...

Read full post

rhymes • Jul 12 '18

Cool!

It's hard to distill such a huge refactoring in a few lines but...

What was your experience about moving an entire app to serverless? What about startup times for the functions?

Especially thanks to this part you wrote:

I wrote backend services in Python 3.6 for AWS Lambda.

:-D

Chinmay Joshi • Aug 29 '18

Hey @rhymes .

The overall experience with Serverless was outstanding. And I learned a lot through the process.

I have never worked on Python before. So learning and implementing services in Python was a big task.
We reduced the overall cost, tremendously.
Well, I am not sure about the startup time. The function invocation was immediate. I never had to configure anything after deploying the function. The function auto-scales depending on the number of requests. We never had to worry about configuring anything. Which is an excellent thing about Lambdas.

I found this inside AWS docs about Automatic scaling -

AWS Lambda invokes your code only when needed and automatically scales to support the rate of incoming requests without requiring you to configure anything. There is no limit to the number of requests your code can handle. AWS Lambda typically starts running your code within milliseconds of an event, and since Lambda scales automatically, the performance remains consistently high as the frequency of events increases. Since your code is stateless, Lambda can start as many instances of it as needed without lengthy deployment and configuration delays.

rhymes • Aug 29 '18

Well, it sounds great! Thank you for the answer :)

I wondered about startup times with Python, it's not as bad as Java (due to the lack of JIT compilation) but it's not the fastest either. You definitely answered my question.

Chinmay Joshi • Aug 29 '18

I am glad I could help. I am still new to this technology stack. :)

Adekoyejo Akinhanmi • Jul 12 '18

I would really like to experiment with serverless. Could you share some starter tips? Cheers

Chinmay Joshi • Aug 29 '18

Hey @janguianof , thanks for sharing the tutorial!

@senornigeria , I would like to share the material I followed.

First, you can start learning more about service-based architecture.
Then you can move to know more about Serverless. You can follow different blogs on the official website.
We used AWS Lambda for writing our services. Various companies (Google, Azure, IBM) are offering the same thing as AWS Lambdas. You can start by reading about how what Lambdas are. Followed by multiple tutorials provided by AWS.
After that for solving different problems I just randomly followed posts on dev.to
Here's a repository by Serverless with tons of examples. And they are pretty good.