Mustafa Shabbir Karimi – 14066

Case Study: Use of AWS Lambda for Building a Serverless Chat

Application
Executive Summary:
Tech giants such as Facebook and WhatsApp have promoted conversational UI resulting in
growing interest for using relevant technologies in business. The latest trend of serverless
computing architecture, where everything is maintained by the cloud provider has taken the
world of cloud computing by storm. Because of serverless computing users don’t need to
maintain, monitor, and schedule servers. The majority of code is run in simplified stateless
blocks run using triggered events. This study talks about AWS Lambda framework, a rapidly
evolving serverless computing platform.
While looking at security OTP was found as more reliable and secure over HTTP. The study
helps implementing abstraction for serverless architecture which helps in cross server data
management, resource allocation and isolation with other things. The major shift to serverless
cloud computing was due to cost comparison of running a web app on AWS Lambda. This could
be said as Function AS A Service (FAAS)
By using Amazon’s services, the developer is not responsible for the hassle of accessibility,
reliability, scalability, and security etc. as Amazon handles them automatically by accessing
requirements. Amazon S3 is the storage for web and tailored for web-scaled computing. It
provides a simple solution for data access and retrieval. The data is stored using a key, which
uniquely identifies the object in bucket. AWS Lambda is a trigger driven (FAAS) model that
allows functions to run on AWS; using pay as you run mechanism. Amazon handles the servers
so the developer focuses on the code. Lambda supports all major languages and compiler tools.
There are multiple reasons for choosing Lambda, such as creation of execution functions, time
of execution, and billing mechanism. Lambda only bills user for the time used and hence
significantly reduces the bill. Lambda also is easily saleable and server is automatically kept up
to date. IAM manages users and groups for the user. It defines ”roles” which allows a user to
define pre-packaged access sets. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database provided by AWS. It is
basically a key-value storage system used in this serverless application. Amazon API Gateway is
a service offering that allows a developer to deploy non-AWS applications to AWS backend
resources, such as servers. Amazon Cognito is a User Management System used to manage user
pools that controls user authentication and access for mobile applications. CloudWatch is used
to provide data insights while Amazon CloudFront is a middle-ware which resides in between a
user request and the S3 data center.
The end result is a serverless application with user authentication, messaging, session
monitoring, an excellent interface, and that is platform independent. The app is also future
proof in terms of scale lability and change of infrastructure.

Why Lambda was chosen:

 Lambda enables the creation of a new execution of functions in milliseconds
 Lambda bills a user for just the time you took and bill is generated for just the power
computed
 On the other hand, EC2 bills by the second; user might be forced to pay for the
computing power he/she might not be using
 For Lambda, all you need to do is code, build and upload your function triggers will
execute it however it is required while in EC2, you have to pay for the server’s OS boot
time also
 Lambda can scale up to a thousand parallel executions.
 y. In lambda, AWS automatically keeps the server up to date

Explain how you can use Server-less Chat Application in business case
scenario?
Use Cases: Building Restful APIs, Websockets, Parallel Compute,
Asynchronous Processing, and Development Velocity & More Value

The chat Application can be used in many things

 Can be a part of broader app launched in the future.

 User Authenticated communication for inter business and commercial applications
 Session monitoring for data integrity when used in high-risk business environment
 Platform Independence will have seamless communication from multiple devices
 Highly Scalable so can be expanded or reduced depending on user size, perfect for
business of any size
 Involves zero maintenance so zero management is required on business side.