Traffic patterns – to serverless or not to serverless?

Nik Rahmel, BBC

Serverless is great, and iPlayer has been utilising managed serverless infrastructure since 2015, and specifically cloud functions with AWS Lambda since early 2016.
In that time period, iPlayer has changed massively – the size of our catalogue has increased by around 100%, with ambitious plans for the future. The industry has changed massively, and the types of content we offer, too.

We have some components with either a low traffic or predictable load. For some patterns, it makes more sense to go serverless, and for others to go semi-serverless and distribute load across servers using message queues. What considerations do we take into account to make a decision on this, and at what point does it make sense to switch from one to the other?

I’ll be talking about what role serverless plays in scaling iPlayer with an ever-changing feature set and varying audience patterns, and under which circumstances we have migrated away from serverless, as well as to serverless infrastructure.

Objective of the talk

To share best-practices around decision-making of when to use serverless, and share applicable patterns.

Required audience experience

Basic knowledge of AWS technology is helpful but not strictly necessary.

You can view Nik’s slides below:

Nik Ramel – To Serverless or not to serverless

Track 2
Location: Gielgud Date: November 7, 2019 Time: 10:55 am - 11:40 am Nik Rahmel, BBC Nik Rahmel, BBC