Overview

The presentation titled Using Ruby on AWS's Lambda by Emiliano Della Casa focuses on leveraging Ruby programming within AWS's Lambda environment, highlighting practical development and deployment strategies. By utilizing real-world examples, he illustrates why Ruby was selected for certain projects and how to effectively transition from a monolithic to a microservices architecture while maintaining Ruby as the primary programming language.

Key Points Discussed

• Introduction to AWS and Lambda:

  • AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the leading cloud services provider, crucial for modern cloud computing with a variety of services including AWS Lambda, introduced in 2014 as a serverless, event-driven computing service.

• Understanding AWS Lambda:

  • Lambda allows developers to run code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers, operating on a pay-per-use model, which charges based on the execution time and memory utilized by the function.

• Code Execution Lifecycle:

  • Discussion of the lifecycle involves downloading code, initiating the execution environment, and running both initial (blue) and subsequent request (yellow) codes, underscoring how billing occurs only for running requests.

• Function as a Service (FaaS) Advantages:

  • Developers can concentrate on code rather than infrastructure, resulting in reduced time-to-market and flexible costs.

• Practical Ruby Code Examples:

  • Demonstrated a basic "hello world" implementation in Ruby using Lambda, followed by a more complex service that sends notifications via an HTTP request.
  • Emphasized the microservices approach for scalability and framework agnosticism.

• Deployment Strategies:

  • Illustrated how to automate deployment using the Serverless framework, highlighting AWS Lambda’s handling of Ruby code and its limitations regarding gem dependencies, leading to the introduction of AWS Lambda layers for easy dependency management.

• Comparative Technologies:

  • Emiliano compared Lambda to Docker and Kubernetes, indicating Lambda’s simplicity over orchestration complexities in Kubernetes, while still addressing the potential use of Docker for local environment replication.

• Automated Testing:

  • Discussed integrating RSpec for automated testing, exemplifying how to manage development dependencies in a production environment efficiently.

Conclusion

The talk concludes with the idea that adopting a balanced approach between monolithic and microservices architectures is crucial, as not all components warrant shifts to microservices. The adaptability, ease of implementation, and cost-effectiveness of AWS Lambda make it a potent choice for Ruby developers to create scalable applications while focusing on deployment efficiency.

Overall, the session provided insights into using Ruby on AWS's Lambda effectively, with practical demonstrations and comparisons to other technologies in cloud computing.