Serverless Economics

Co-hosts Joshua Proto and Ryan Jones take a look at a case study about Realtor.com®. Realtor.com® is a trusted resource for home buyers, sellers, and dreamers, offering a comprehensive database of for-sale properties as well as the information, tools, and professional expertise to help people move confidently through every step of their home journey. But when they needed to move from batch processing to real-time processing they turned to serverless. Was this switch worth it? Show Notes: SERVICES USED: Kinesis data stream Kinesis firehose EC2 Lambda AWS Professional Services PROBLEMS FACED: The company’s customers needed to change their ad campaigns in real-time and not have to wait for days or weeks. This required realtor.com to evolve from batch processing to real-time processing. Realtor.com also felt limited in terms of its ability to effectively support user traffic, which varied depending on the time of day or year. Growth, however, was becoming increasingly challenging for the company, not only in the number of people using the site but also in the number and complexity of new features we’re developing.

In this episode hosts Ryan Jones and Joshua Proto look into iRobot's use of Serverless to help run their first internet-connected Roomba vacuum. And if you like this podcast and want more Serverless content, then check out Ryan and Josh's other podcast Talking Serverless where they chat with people doing amazing things in the world of Cloud Computing. Always free: talkingserverless.io Case Study Summary:  Customers are demanding easier ways to interact with a growing number of products and technologies throughout the home iRobot, which had so far operated primarily as a hardware vendor, was about to bet its central line of business on its ability to run a high-availability, customer-facing cloud application and an Internet of Things (IoT) backend platform iRobot began to build out its family of connected Roomba vacuums—and as the sheer number of connected customers and services quickly multiplied—iRobot recognized it needed a solution that could scale more quickly and allowed for more direct control.

If you’re a fan of video games then you won’t want to miss this episode as hosts, Ryan Jones and Joshua Proto, take a look into Square Enix's decision to use serverless in their efforts to better run their Dragon Quest X phone app. Square Enix is a Japanese based video game company with flagship games such as Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Dragon Quest to just name a few. They have been innovators in their field for decades but what does the introduction of serverless have in store for them? And if you like this podcast and want more Serverless content, then check out Ryan and Josh's other podcast Talking Serverless where they chat with people doing amazing things in the world of Cloud Computing. Always free: talkingserverless.io  Summary of Case Study: Developers at Square Enix realize that image processing is resource-intensive on their gaming app Dragon Quest X. That means there is a spike in server load when a lot of people take screenshots at the same time, such as during events. Usually, 200 to 300 images are received for processing each minute, but during New Year's Eve in-game events, this can climb as high as 6,000 images per minute. Accelerating this process and boosting customer satisfaction was one of the challenges Square Enix faced in growing its customer base. AWS Lambda had a striking effect. Image processing that used to take several hours was finished in a little over 10 seconds.

Alameda County discovered it had some limitations with its election-reporter viewer. In 2014 disaster struck for the County when it was discovered that the on-premises servers that were built using GIS crashed when it was uploading the first set of results during that year's election cycle. They knew they couldn’t have the same thing happen for 2016, but the estimates for updating the GIS powered application was estimated to be around $20,000 plus the cost of managing and purchasing new server infrastructure. Serverless was their solution, but was it the right one? Take a dive into this case study with our hosts Ryan Jones, and Joshua Proto, and see what Alameda County did right, wrong, and what kind of lasting impacts their experiment with Serverless could have in the future. 

“We were an on-premises software company for a long time, and it sometimes took years to create and deliver solutions to our customers,” says Joshua Prismon, vice president of product development at FICO. Josh Proto and Ryan Jones share how FICO was able to start making valuable software updates in a matter of days instead of weeks using serverless and AWS. In Summary: - FICO delivers software solutions to 95% of the US's largest financial institutions - Initially an on-premesis software company, it sometimes took years for FICO to develop and launch new features for its software - In order to meet their market's need for a better product and customer's demand for relevant features, FICO switched to AWS for its software architecture - AWS was chosen because of it's commitment to security and compliance for the financial service industry - FICO is now able to develop and troubleshoot new features in a measure of months or weeks, not years