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AWS re:Invent 2018: [REPEAT 1] A Serverless Journey: AWS Lambda Under the Hood (SRV409-R1)

Amazon Web Services · 71.6K views · 2018-11-30 · 59:13

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Overview

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session in which Holly Mesrobian and Marc Brooker explain how AWS Lambda is built, including its sandboxing, isolation and scaling architecture. It covers what happens under the hood when serverless code runs.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the authoritative description of Lambda internals and isolation, by the engineers who built it.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2019–2019

Topics

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilityDistributed systems
Search by tags
aws lambdaserverlessisolationfirecrackerreinvent

What people said

appwiz · 2019-06 · Recommendation

Here are a couple videos from reInvent 2018: Jaso talking about DynamoDB internals [LINK] Marc talking about Lambda internals [VIDEO]

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staticassertion · 2019-01 · Recommendation

I believe AWS does share customer information within a device, but with a lot of sandboxing below that. You can watch this talk to learn more: [VIDEO] I think the threat model is basically that you'd need a KVM kernel 0-day + the ability to exploit it, so a point of privilege such as outside of the firecracker sandbox.

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discodave · 2019-03 · Reference

AWS SDE here. The short answer is, in order to get your team to adopt something, you need to make the case that it's better for customers (including things like migration costs). If the modern thing is more efficient, is higher availability, increases velocity, and so on then the case can be made. Some specific examples based on things you cite: * For an example of something OSS or "modern" coming from AWS, checkout Firecracker (written in Rust): [LINK] * With regards to "reinventing wheels" Apollo + EC2 solves a lot (not all) of the problems that containers solve, and existed for years before containers became the hotness. * Docker, which brought containers to the masses launched in 2013. * EC2 launched in 2006 (7 years before Docker). * Apollo (and the build system Brazil) predated EC2 by many years. * Amazon.com was migrating to EC2/AWS before 2012 ( [LINK] ) * Another example, Lambda, which launched in 2014 runs on EC2 ( [VIDEO] ). * New services get to build in AWS and use Lambda, ECS, DynamoDB etc based on their business needs.

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Sources

Video by Amazon Web Services, played through YouTube.

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