Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Lift and shift a web application to serverless: Yes, it’s possible! (BOA326)

Summary

Marce Vizalba, a developer advocate for the Serverless team, and Danilo, from the Developer Relations team, share their experience of lifting and shifting a web application to serverless.
Marce recounts an initial challenging migration to serverless in 2016, which took nine months and faced issues upon deployment.
They discuss the Strangler pattern, which involves migrating an application piece by piece, but for their use case, a lift and shift approach was deemed more suitable.
The session covers strategies for migrating a backend, frontend, and database to serverless with minimal code changes.
They address common migration problems, cost, and performance, with Marce accepting the challenge to make a serverless web application perform as well as a non-serverless environment.
The application in question is an e-commerce platform using MongoDB, Node.js with Express for the backend, and React for the frontend.
Migration requirements include scalability, minimal infrastructure management, and high availability.
They propose using AWS CDK with TypeScript to automate the architecture implementation.
MongoDB Atlas is chosen for the database due to its serverless option.
For the backend, AWS Lambda is selected over Fargate and App Runner because it meets the requirement to scale to zero.
The AWS Lambda Web Adapter is introduced as a tool to run web applications on Lambda, supporting various programming languages and web frameworks.

The lift and shift approach to serverless migration can be a viable strategy when a complete re-platforming is necessary, and the Strangler pattern is not suitable.
Serverless architectures can offer significant benefits in terms of scalability, infrastructure management, and availability, which are particularly valuable for variable workloads like e-commerce platforms.
AWS CDK and TypeScript can be powerful tools for automating and managing cloud infrastructure as code, providing a strongly typed language that can help guide the architecture building process.
MongoDB Atlas's serverless option on AWS allows for a seamless migration of databases with minimal changes, which is crucial for lift and shift strategies.
The AWS Lambda Web Adapter is a key innovation that enables traditional web applications to run on Lambda without significant code changes, broadening the scope of applications that can benefit from serverless architectures.
The session demonstrates that with careful planning and the right tools, it is possible to migrate existing web applications to a serverless model while addressing common concerns such as performance and cost.