At BandLab we specialise in orchestrating and automating highly available infrastructures. In this post we’ll share some lessons learned from optimising DevOps and how that led the team to the Serverless Framework.
Optimising DevOps
Back in 2016 we acquired the iOS app Composr (designed and built by Nick Den Engelsman) which was fully EC2—Ruby on Rails.
Nick decided whilst building Composr that it didn’t make sense to spend money on resources which could only be used on the odd occasion, for testing and staging purposes.
As AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda were maturing, we invested our time in using these newer styles of computing, to prove that it is entirely possible to design complete applications without having to manage any servers.
The Serverless Framework seemed like the perfect fit to accomplish our current goals, noting that it used CloudFormation from the start also gave us the assurance that deployments would be straight-forward and battle-tested.
Today at BandLab
BandLab is where musicians and music fans from all over the world come together to make, collaborate and share Music. Available on both iOS and Android, everything created on BandLab is hosted in the cloud, so you can capture musical ideas wherever you are, then further develop them.
A creative, collaborative, global community of Musicians
The Serverless Framework was easy to pick up within our team, even for developers without prior AWS knowledge.
After migrating the first few existing microservices towards a serverless setup, we were able to handle more events and background tasks in less time, which in return led to happier users on our platform (and less costs). We came to the conclusion that we wanted to push even further with this technology; to try and go serverless first.
Serverless First
The Serverless Framework has now become a core component within our organisation. It allows us to define a standardised way of developing/deploying microservices to release to market faster, and keep our cost of ownership low.
In general the Serverless Framework makes our work and work-life just a little bit happier 🙂
Today, BandLab is running most of its AWS infrastructure without any self-managed servers (with just a few EC2 instances left). Since we run fewer servers, we have less people to worry about maintenance, monitoring, patching, scaling alarms and other such tasks, which = happy developers.
