Hi welcome to my Cloud and Serverless Computing home. I have been providing training on Cloud and Serverless computing for my team recently. I myself just use the apportunity to build and launch this serverless web portal. Over the years, I have led and developed many projects at my work. All those projects have been done and done well. I got a sense of great accomplishments out of them and felt very rewarding. I always feel like I need to build something for myself. But in those days, it was not an easy undertaking because you could have all the application building skills under your belt, but you had to have your own web server, database server, etc. Since I did not run my own business, it made no sense to spend a lot on servers. Of course you could host your site somewhere on a hosting provider, but you would not have all the freedom to flex your software development power to build whatever you would like into your hosted site.\r\n Now the mature Cloud platforms and Serverless frameworks open a whole new horizon and opportunities for businesses, large or small, and for individuals as well.\r\n I got all the cloud expertise and programming skills under my belt with years of software development experience, so it's just a breeze for me to build and launch this serverless web application. I just don't know how it's going to evolve and what I am going to do with it eventually. For now I can just share the knowledge with my colleagues and whoever is interested. And also use it as home for my IoT projects. This serverless portal is still in the process of construction. I am not trying to make it sporty and fancy right now as my spare time is limited. I am documenting what core AWS services and programming skills you need to build a Serverless solution (see more details here). I will fill in more content.
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IoT is a big thing these days. One application category of IoT is smart home. Many homes are becoming smart with all cool smart devices connected to the internet. And you can take care of your home front even if you are on travel on the other side of the globe.\r\n Quite some IoT providers are on the market and you can just buy their smart devices and subscribe their services. But as an IT professional with all the cloud computing and programming skills under your belt, is it cool to build your own smart devices and set up your IoT portal on a Cloud Service provider such as AWS?\r\n Here is exactly what I am doing. I have just started building my own smart home IoT. I can check my home temperature and humidity right here. I will try to build more devices when I have free time. If you are a tech guy and and a little handy, try to build one and see details here.
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\r\nCloud computing wagon is raging along relentlessly. Many businesses are trying to jump on the wagon to take advantages of it such as cost effienecy, fast-to-market, flexibility, scalibility, global accessibility. Right now the major public cloud providers are AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as many of you know, there are four major service models in the pulic cloud platform.
\r\nInfrastructure as a service (IaaS) The cloud provider gives you all capabilities to build your own virtual machines, block storage, load balancing, etc. This model is similar to your current on-premises data center operation model, but it is implemented on the cloud provider's platform so that you don't need to buy any physical hardware. If you need to migrate your on-premises applications without much modification, this can be a good option.\r\n Another use case is that you need to manage your own resources, say, for compliance's reason. So it is up to your use cases.\r\n If you need to run your applications or microservices at the container level instead of virtual machine level, Kubernetes is a very popular portable and extensible open-source platform for the purpose. You can deploy a Kubernetes cluster on an IaaS platform. One of the benefits of Kubernetes platform is your containerized applications and services can be portable across IaaS providers, so that you don't have to get stuck with a particular cloud provider if for some business reason you need to switch cloud provider.
\r\nPlatform as a service (PaaS) PaaS providers offer a development environment to applicatiion developers. It makes the development and deployment a lot easier. The users can focus on creating and running applications rather than constructing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure and services. An example is AWS Elastic Beanstalk service. You can easily deploy, for example, a LAMP stack web application with load balancing and autoscaling features in AWS Elastic Beanstalk service. Another example which is used at my work place is Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It makes deploying microservices very simple and straightforward. We can just push our buildpack in Java with a CF push command. However using PaaS you still have to manage the underlying infrastruction in a certain degree. Let's say you need to an AWS Beanstalk application within your own private subnet, you need to set up your own VPC and you may need your own NAT instance or use AWS Nat Gateway. In the same way, if you need to deploy your Cloud Foundry platform on AWS within your own VPC, you still have to manage the infrastructure somehow.
\r\nServerless Computing Serverless computing is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages virtual machines as necessary to serve requests, and requests are billed by an abstract measure of the resources required to satisfy the request, rather than per virtual machine, per hour. The users can build a serverless application by using different managed services provided by the different cloud providers. You don't own any servers. All servers are owned and managed transparently by the cloud provider. You only need to construct your application. See more details on how I build my own Serverless portal.
\r\nSoftware as a service (SaaS) In SaaS model, the users use the provider's applications running on the cloud infrastructure. The users just subscribe the application with the provider paying a subscription fee or paying per use basis. Google G Suite and Github are examples of SaaS. So the user does not need to build any application and has no infrastructure to manage. Basically you don't need an IT team for building your own application.
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Which cloud service model should you choose? There is no one-fit-all answer. It depends on your business use case, your current on-premises infrastructure, your talent pool, and many other factors. One business may have a hybrid model, i.e. using multiple models at the same time while another business may totally go serverless, especially smaller businesses. Many businesses now use this rule of thumb: if SaaS fits the need, just buy the SaaS service; if not, examine if Serverless fits the need; if still not, look at the PaaS model or Container Platform such as Kubernetes; then last look at the IaaS model.
\r\n \r\nExamples on how to use AWS managed services in a cloud application
\r\n \r\nChatbot is another hot topic nowdays. A chatbot is a computer program that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual method. They are powered by natural language processing technology and artificial intelligence.\r\n Various chatbot platforms and services are available on the market now, for example, AWS Lex, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson. To make our chatbot smart and provide good customer experience, we have to leverage big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other related technologies. However using a chatbot and integrating it in your application is not that difficult.
\r\nHere you can see I have integrated this live chatbot into my serverless portal page as a demo. The chatbot is a live dummy chatbot I have set up in AWS Lex service. Imagine you have a smart chatbot that can connect to your systems on cloud and/or on-premises to get all the power to assist customers. It will be put on a customer-facing application, web or mobile.
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\r\nIf you try to interact with the demo chatbot without getting any response, that's because I set up in such way so only authenticated users can try.
\r\nHere I walk through how I build an IoT device and how to use the device with AWS IoT Core service and then bring the data to My IoT portal page
\r\nServerless Computing is a big application trend, to say the least. Public cloud platforms make it possible and its adoption is accelerating. Basically all you need is a cloud provider of your preference and some developer(s) with established cloud expertise and development skills. You don't have to manage any hardware and you don't need to worry about availability and scalability and many other aspects of running your own data center or hardware.
\r\nI have built my own Serverless web portal hosted on AWS Cloud platform with a few weekends. My portal right now does not have a lot content, but you got the idea why Serverless Computing is so powerful.
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\r\nIf You need a technology partner for your business, or if you need a Cloud solution, Serverless solution, or you just have some comments on my serverless web portal,\r\n you can contact me using the form below.
\r\nMy Cloud and Serverless Computing Portal
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