Serverless is rapidly gaining traction, offering limitless possibilities constrained only by a developer’s imagination. Even traditional companies are beginning to adopt it. However, with these new possibilities come new challenges, and we love to share creative solutions that address them with you.
We came across a series of 3 insightful articles from the BBC Design+Engineering team, detailing how they rebuilt BBC Online from the ground up to future-proof the platform. The articles explore potential pitfalls and the strategies they used to prevent excessive redundancy costs.
If we had serverless functions calling serverless functions directly without intermediate caching, we would be chaining them. This is a problem as we would be paying for the first to sit idle, waiting for the second to return.
Part 1: Moving BBC Online to the cloud
To tackle a behemoth of a platform with over 200 different types of pages and 44 different language, the team turned to AWS Lambda.
Part 2: Delivering BBC Online using Serverless
Part 3: Optimising serverless for BBC Online
Particularly the third post of the series caught our attention as it demonstrates how the BBC developers devised a clever custom solution to address the issue of chaining functions, which can lead to idle functions and significant costs. Their approach strikes the optimal balance between price and performance.
Read the ful article here by Johnathan Ishmael, Lead Technical Architect - BBC
