Building Enterprise Level Web Applications on AWS Lambda with the DEEP Framework

From the beginning, Mitoc Group has been building web applications for enterprise customers. We are a small group of developers who are helping customers with their entire web development process, from conception through execution and down to maintenance. Being in the business of doing everything is very hard, and it would be impossible without using AWS foundational services, but we incrementally needed more. That is why we became early adopters of the serverless computing approach and developed an ecosystem called Digital Enterprise End-to-end Platform (DEEP) with AWS Lambda at the core.
In this post, we dive deeper into how DEEP is using AWS Lambda to empower developers to build cloud-native applications or platforms using microservices architecture. We will walk you through the process of identifying the front-end, back-end and data tiers required to build web applications with AWS Lambda at the core. We will focus on the structure of the AWS Lambda functions we use, as well as security, performance and benchmarking steps that we take to build enterprise-level web applications.

Enterprise-level web applications

Our approach to web development is full-stack and user-driven, focused on UI (aka the user interface) and UX (aka user eXperience). Before going into the details, we’d like to emphasize the strategical (biased and opinionated) decisions we made early on:

• We don’t say “no” to customers; every problem is seriously evaluated and sometimes we offer options that involve our direct competitors.
• We are developers and we focus only on the application level; everything else (platform level and infrastructure level) must be managed by AWS.
• We focus 20% of effort to solve 80% of work load; everything must be automated and pushed on the service side rather than the client side.

To be honest and fair, it doesn’t work all the time as expected, but it does help us to learn fast and move quickly, sustainably and incrementally solving business problems through technical solutions that really matter. However, the definition of “really matter” differs from customer to customer, quite uniquely in some cases.
Nevertheless, what we have learned from our customers is that enterprise-level web applications must provide the following common expectations:

• Be secure  — security through obscurity (e.g., Amazon IAM, Amazon Cognito)
• Be compliant  — governance-focused, audit-friendly service features with applicable compliance or audit standards
• Be reliable  — service level agreements (e.g. Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront)
• Be performant  — studies show that page loads longer than 2s start impacting the users behavior
• Be pluggable — successful enterprise ecosystem is mainly driven by fully integrated web applications inside organizations;
• Be cost-efficient  — a benefit of the AWS Free Tier, as well as pay only for services that you use and when you use them
• Be scalable  — the serverless approach relies on abstracted services that are pre-scaled to AWS size, whatever that would be

Architecture

This post describes how we transformed a self-managed task management application (aka todo app) in minutes. The original version can be seen on www.todomvc.com and the original code can be downloaded from https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/master/examples/angularjs.
The architecture of every web application we build or transform, including the one described above, is similar to the reference architecture of the realtime voting application published recently by AWS on GitHub.
The todo app is written in AngularJS and deployed on Amazon S3, behind Amazon CloudFront (front-end). Task management is processed by AWS Lambda, optionally behind Amazon API Gateway (back-end). Task metadata is stored in Amazon DynamoDB (data tier). The transformed todo app, along with instructions on how to install and deploy this web application, is described in the Building Scalable Web Apps with AWS Lambda and Home-Grown Serverless blog post and the todo code is available on GitHub.
Let’s look at AWS Lambda functions and the value proposition they offer to us and our customers.

AWS Lambda functions

The goal of the todo app is to manage tasks in a self-service mode. End users can view tasks, create new tasks, mark or unmark a task as done, and clear completed tasks. From the UI point of view, that leads to four user interactions that require different back-end calls:

• web service that retrieves tasks
• web service that creates tasks
• web service that deletes tasks
• web service that updates tasks

A simple reordering of the above identified back-end services calls leads to basic CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations on the Task data object. These are the simple logical steps that we take to identify the front-end, back-end, and data tiers of (drums beating, trumpets playing) our approach to microservices, which we prefer to call microapplications.
Therefore, coming back to AWS Lambda, we have written four small Node.js functions that are context-bounded and self-sustained (each microservice corresponds to the above identified back-end web service):

Microservice that retrieves tasks

JavaScript

'use strict';

import DeepFramework from 'deep-framework';

export default class Handler extends DeepFramework.Core.AWS.Lambda.Runtime {
  /**
   * @param {Array} args
   */
  constructor(...args) {
    super(...args);
  }

  /**
   * @param request
   */
  handle(request) {
    let taskId = request.getParam('Id');

    if (taskId) {
      this.retrieveTask(taskId, (task) => {
        return this.createResponse(task).send();
      });
    } else {
      this.retrieveAllTasks((result) => {
        return this.createResponse(result).send();
      });
    }
  }

  /**
   * @param {Function} callback
   */
  retrieveAllTasks(callback) {
    let TaskModel = this.kernel.get('db').get('Task');

    TaskModel.findAll((err, task) => {
      if (err) {
        throw new DeepFramework.Core.Exception.DatabaseOperationException(err);
      }

      return callback(task.Items);
    });
  }

  /**
   * @param {String} taskId
   * @param {Function} callback
   */
  retrieveTask(taskId, callback) {
    let TaskModel = this.kernel.get('db').get('Task');

    TaskModel.findOneById(taskId, (err, task) => {
      if (err) {
        throw new DeepFramework.Core.Exception.DatabaseOperationException(err);
      }

      return callback(task ? task.get() : null);
    });
  }
}

Microservice that creates a task

JavaScript

'use strict';

import DeepFramework from 'deep-framework';

export default class extends DeepFramework.Core.AWS.Lambda.Runtime {
  /**
   * @param {Array} args
   */
  constructor(...args) {
    super(...args);
  }

  /**
   * @param request
   */
  handle(request) {
    let TaskModel = this.kernel.get('db').get('Task');

    TaskModel.createItem(request.data, (err, task) => {
      if (err) {
        throw new DeepFramework.Core.Exception.DatabaseOperationException(err);
      }

      return this.createResponse(task.get()).send();
    });
  }
}

Microservice that updates a task

JavaScript

'use strict';

import DeepFramework from 'deep-framework';

export default class Handler extends DeepFramework.Core.AWS.Lambda.Runtime {
  /**
   * @param {Array} args
   */
  constructor(...args) {
    super(...args);
  }

  /**
   * @param request
   */
  handle(request) {
    let taskId = request.getParam('Id');

    if (typeof taskId !== 'string') {
      throw new InvalidArgumentException(taskId, 'string');
    }

    let TaskModel = this.kernel.get('db').get('Task');

    TaskModel.updateItem(taskId, request.data, (err, task) => {
      if (err) {
        throw new DeepFramework.Core.Exception.DatabaseOperationException(err);
      }

      return this.createResponse(task.get()).send();
    });
  }
}

Microservice that deletes a task

JavaScript

'use strict';

import DeepFramework from 'deep-framework';

export default class extends DeepFramework.Core.AWS.Lambda.Runtime {
  /**
   * @param {Array} args
   */
  constructor(...args) {
    super(...args);
  }

  /**
   * @param request
   */
  handle(request) {
    let taskId = request.getParam('Id');

    if (typeof taskId !== 'string') {
      throw new DeepFramework.Core.Exception.InvalidArgumentException(taskId, 'string');
    }

    let TaskModel = this.kernel.get('db').get('Task');

    TaskModel.deleteById(taskId, (err) => {
      if (err) {
        throw new DeepFramework.Core.Exception.DatabaseOperationException(err);
      }

      return this.createResponse({}).send();
    });
  }
}

Each above file with related dependencies is compressed into .zip file and uploaded to AWS Lambda. If you’re new to this process, we strongly recommend following the How to Create, Upload and Invoke an AWS Lambda function tutorial.
Back to the four small Node.js functions, you can see that we have adopted ES6 (aka ES2015) as our coding standard. And we are importing deep-framework in every function. What is this framework anyway and why are we using it everywhere?

Full-stack web framework

Step back for a minute. Building and uploading AWS Lambda functions to the service is very simple and straight-forward, but now imagine that you need to manage 100–150 web services to access a web page, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of web pages.
We believe that the only way to achieve this kind of flexibility and scale is automation and code reuse. These principles led us to build and open source DEEP Framework — a full-stack web framework that abstracts web services and web applications from specific cloud services — and DEEP CLI (aka deepify) — a development tool-chain that abstracts package management and associated development operations.
Therefore, to make sure that the process of managing AWS Lambda functions is streamlined and automated, we consistently include two more files in each uploaded .zip:

DEEP microservice bootstrap

JavaScript

'use strict';

import DeepFramework from 'deep-framework';
import Handler from './Handler';

export default DeepFramework.LambdaHandler(Handler);

DEEP microservice package metadata (for npm) 

JavaScript

{
  "name": "deep-todo-task-create",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "description": "Create a new todo task",
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "npm run compile",
    "compile": "deepify compile-es6 `pwd`"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "deep-framework": "^1.8.x"
  },
  "preferGlobal": false,
  "private": true,
  "analyze": true
}

Having these three files (Handler.es6, bootstrap.es6, and package.json) in each Lambda function doesn’t mean that your final .zip file will be that small. Actually, a lot of additional operations happen before the .zip file is created. To name a few:

• AWS Lambda performs better when the uploaded codebase is smaller. Because we provide both local development capabilities and one-step push to production, our process optimizes resources before deploying to AWS.
• ES6 is not supported by the node.js v0.10.x runtime that we use in AWS Lambda, it is however available in the Node 4.3 runtime, so we compile .es6 files into ES5-compliant .js files using Babel.
• Dependencies that are defined in package.json are automatically pulled and fine-tuned for node.js v0.10.x to provide the best performance possible.

Putting everything together

First, you need the following pre-requisites:

1. AWS account (Create an Amazon Web Services Account)
2. AWS CLI (Configure AWS Command Line Interface)
3. Git v2+ (Get Started — Installing Git)
4. Java / JRE v6+ (JDK 8 and JRE 8 Installation Start Here)
5. js v4+ (Install nvm and Use latest node v4)

Note: Don’t use sudo to install nvm. Otherwise, you’ll have to fix npm permissions.
Second, install the DEEP CLI with the following command:
npm install deepify -g
Next, deploy the todo app using deepify:
deepify install github://MitocGroup/deep-microservices-todo-app ~/deep-todo-app
deepify server ~/deep-todo-app
deepify deploy ~/deep-todo-app
Note: When the deepify server command is finished, you can open http://localhost:8000 in your browser and enjoy the todo app running locally.

Cleaning up

There are at least half a dozen services and several dozen of resources created during deepify deploy. If only there was a simple command that would clean up everything when we’re done. We thought of that and created deepify undeploy to address this need. When you are done using todo app and want to remove web app related resources, execute the following:
deepify undeploy ~/deep-todo-app
As you can see, we empower developers to build hassle-free, cloud-native applications or platforms using microservices architecture and serverless computing.
And what about security?

Security

One of the biggest value propositions on AWS is out-of-the-box security and compliance. The beauty of the cloud-native approach is that security comes by design (in other words, it won’t work otherwise). We take full advantage of that shared responsibility model and enforce security in every layer.
End users benefit from IAM best practices through streamlined implementations of least privilege access, delegated roles instead of credentials, and integration with logging and monitoring services (e.g., AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service + Kibana). For example, developers and end users of the todo app didn’t need to explicitly define any security roles (it was done by deepify deploy), but they can rest assured that only their instance of todo app will be using their infrastructure, platform, and application resources.
The following are two security roles (back-end and front-end) that have been seamlessly generated and enforced in each layer:

IAM role that allows back-end invocation of AWS Lambda function (e.g. DeepProdTodoCreate1234abcd) in web application AWS account (e.g. 123456789000)

JavaScript

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": ["lambda:InvokeFunction"],
            "Resource": ["arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:123456789000:function:DeepProdTodoCreate1234abcd*"]
        }
    ]
}

DEEP role that allows front-end resource (e.g deep.todo:task) to execute action (e.g. deep.todo:task:create)

JavaScript

{
  "Version": "2015-10-07",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": ["deep.todo:task:create"],
      "Resource": ["deep.todo:task"]
    }
  ]
}

Benchmarking

We have been continuously benchmarking AWS Lambda for various use cases in our microapplications. After a couple of repetitive situations doing similar analysis, we decided to build the benchmarking as another microapplication and re-use the ecosystem to include it automatically where we needed it. You can find the open-source code for the benchmarking microapplication on GitHub:
Particularly, for todo app, we performed various benchmarking analysis on AWS Lambda by tweaking different components in a specific function (e.g. function size, memory size, billable cost, etc.). Next, we would like to share results with you:

Benchmarking for todo app

Req No	Function Size (MB)	Memory Size (MB)	Max Memory Used (MB)	Start time	Stop time	Front-end Call (ms)	Back-end Call (ms)	Billed Time (ms)	Billed Time ($)
1	1.1	128	34	20:15.8	20:16.2	359	200.47	300	0.000000624
2	1.1	128	34	20:17.8	20:18.2	381	202.45	300	0.000000624
3	1.1	128	34	20:19.9	20:20.3	406	192.52	200	0.000000416
4	1.1	128	34	20:21.9	20:22.2	306	152.19	200	0.000000416
5	1.1	128	34	20:23.9	20:24.2	333	175.01	200	0.000000416
6	1.1	128	34	20:25.9	20:26.3	431	278.03	300	0.000000624
7	1.1	128	34	20:27.9	20:28.2	323	170.97	200	0.000000416
8	1.1	128	34	20:29.9	20:30.2	327	160.24	200	0.000000416
9	1.1	128	34	20:31.9	20:32.4	556	225.25	300	0.000000624
10	1.1	128	35	20:33.9	20:34.2	333	179.59	200	0.000000416
					Average	375.50	193.67	Total	0.000004992

Performance

Speaking of performance, we find AWS Lambda mature enough to power large-scale web applications. The key is to build the functions as small as possible, focusing on a simple rule of one function to achieve only one task. Over time, these functions might grow in size; therefore, we always keep an eye on them and re-factor / split into the lowest possible logical denominator (smallest task).
Using the benchmarking tool, we ran multiple scenarios on the same function from todo app

Function Size (MB)	Memory Size (MB)	Max Memory Used (MB)	Avg Front-end (ms)	Avg Back-end (ms)	Total Calls (#)	Total Billed (ms)	Total Billed ($/1B)*
1.1	128	34-35	375.50	193.67	10	2,400	4,992
1.1	256	34-37	399.40	153.25	10	2,000	8,340
1.1	512	33-35	341.60	134.32	10	1,800	15,012
1.1	128	34-49	405.57	223.82	100	27,300	56,784
1.1	256	28-48	354.75	177.91	100	23,800	99,246
1.1	512	32-47	345.92	163.17	100	23,100	192,654
55.8	128	49-50	543.00	284.03	10	3,400	7,072
55.8	256	49-50	339.80	153.13	10	2,100	8,757
55.8	512	49-50	342.60	141.02	10	2,000	16,680
55.8	128	83-87	416.10	220.91	100	26,900	55,952
55.8	256	50-71	377.69	194.22	100	25,600	106,752
55.8	512	57-81	353.46	174.65	100	23,300	194,322

Based on performance data, we have learned some pretty cool stuff:

• The smaller the function is, the better it performs; On the other hand, if more memory is allocated, the size of the function matters less and less.
• Memory size is not directly proportional to billable costs; developers can decide the memory size based on performance requirements combined with associated costs.
• The key to better performance is continuous load, thanks to container reuse in AWS Lambda.

Conclusion

In this post, we presented a small web application that is built with AWS Lambda at the core. We walked you through the process of identifying the front-end, back-end, and data tiers required to build the todo app. You can fork the example code repository as a starting point for your own web applications.
If you have questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below.