Serverless Applications

Akkodis capability in bespoke AWS Serverless applications

Akkodis engineers have deep experience in the delivery of effective serverless solutions, dating back to 2014.

“Serverless” is a paradigm in digital service delivery in which the operator of a digital service has no visibility or interaction with the servers and underlying technology it operats on top of. While the software still runs on compute infrastructure and servers, the underlying hardware and software configuration is full managed and almost transparent, with patching, fault tolerance, and scalability hidden away and seamless to the implementation.

The billing mechanism is pay-per-use of the software implementation your business logic, not cents per hour of a server (virtual or physical bare metal); its typically picocents per invocation. Contrast that with a virtual or physical server and you pay for it in cost units over some period of time, or up front for a physical server, whether you use it or not.

With AWS, the concept of Serverless covers a range of types of services: storage, compute, application integration, analytics and machine learning services.

Scaling with Serverless architectures is seamless - there is nothing to manage other than the maximum estimated concurrency, instead of the compute servers and load balancers.

Gone is the need to manage servers and operating systems; patching, rebooting, downtime; this becomes the cloud provider responsibility, at no additional cost. All we concentrate on, is implementing business logic in a programming language version and updating the language major-version over time (eg, Python 2 to 3, Java 8 to 11).

Akkodis has a history in the Cloud of skating to where the puck is heading (as Andy Jassy says) and being ready to deliver technical solutions to clients that are well-architected, secure, and scalable. When AWS services launch (and sometimes before), our technical teams start understanding and interpreting the value they may have to our clients.

For example, with the introduction of AWS Lambda, the Akkodis team knew it would be significant for a number of client workloads. When the Sydney launch of Lambda occurred, Akkodis had already completed our Proof of Concept in other Regions, with deployment templates and patterns ready to go.

In early 2016, when AWS Lambda launched in Australia, Akkodis stood up a production service for one of our clients, to be used by staff at a federal government agency. With a monthly cost measured in single-digit dollars, that service has been secure and cost effective for the agency.

These days, we run Serverless analytics pipelines, web services, integration components, and much more using Serverless as the underlying capability.

Within the ever-expanding suite of AWS Serverless components are options on:

  • Lambda: Client code execution, supporting multiple programming languages
  • HTTPS API endpoint with API Gateway
  • HTTPS certificate vending, with ACM (free and automated within the AWS environment)
  • Application scale-out Messaging services, such as notification and queuing services
  • NoSQL database with DynamoDB, used to power high volume and low volume solutions alike
  • S3: object (file) storage
  • CloudFront: a global content delivery network with advanced capabilities
  • Lambda@Edge: the merging of the Lambda code execution service within the CloudFront Content Delivery distributed network Edge locations
  • Step Functions: a framework to produce applications that work on a distributed event mechanism
  • X-Ray: for distributed application tracing
  • CloudWatch: application metrics, alarms, dashboards
  • CloudWatch Logs: durable log storage
  • CloudWatch Events: Task Schedular/cron as a service
And many more…

Akkodis uses these components to architect, implement, and operate digital solutions and integrations for our clients.

There are several limitations that we are familiar with in a Serverless environment, and Akkodis engineers are highly experienced in this domain over many years. While Serverless may be an attractive option, it may not suit your requirements. The Akkodis AWS Practice team can help guide your project, provide advice on suitability, patterns and anti-patterns, and ensure you can leverage the reduced operational overheads of Serverless in your digital service delivery.

Contact us to engage us for AWS Cloud based serverless software development capabilities. Akkodis can size development teams from small projects, to multi-year, multi-squad transformational change. Our development teams includes Business Analysts, Project Managers, Scrum masters, change managers, developers, system administrators, and DevOps engineers.

Contact Akkodis to find out more