The Way of Serverless: Architecting Event-Based Applications

For the last few decades we have been primarily building applications using a (synchronous) request/response model. Frameworks like Struts, Spring, Rails and Django have been there to help us by making that traditional model easier to use. As organizations move into the cloud and, more specifically, towards building serverless applications, architectures often start evolving into more of an (asynchronous) event-based model. This requires both a different way of thinking about systems and the availability of cloud
services that can help us build applications in this way.

Building with serverless means that our applications are no longer a single deployment artifact, they are now made up of a collection of several cloud-based managed services that communicate with events. Leveraging AWS services like SNS, SQS, Kinesis and the newly released EventBridge, gives us the power and ability to decouple our architectures into resilient, highly available, event-based applications.

In this talk we will cover:

What it means to be event-based
Sync & Async in the serverless world
Architecting for event-based serverless systems
Exploring serverless patterns with EventBridge
Event visibility & analytics

About Dave Townsend

Dave Townsend is a Principal Software Engineer in the Innovation & Architecture group at Matson, Inc. where he specializes in designing and delivering end-to-end cloud based software solutions. Dave also leads Matson’s mobile product team. A 15-year software veteran, Dave is passionate about cloud and mobile architecture.

More About Dave »