Purely by chance our day 4 of Re:Invent concentrated on sessions around serverless architecture, service oriented architecture and Amazon’s approach to developing software services. The details below are fairly developer oriented and in depth around the serverless architecture.

The first announcement of the day was at a session on API Gateway and it’s many uses. API Gateway is a service which provides an Application Programmers Interface to a backend resource on AWS. Web and mobile client applications as well as 3rd party integrations can access application resources via REST using an API Gateway. API Gateway provides lots of functionality to secure, authenticate, throttle, as well as translating requests/responses and caching.

Amazon announced a new API Gateway type which is the API Gateway HTTP API, so good they have put API twice in the name !!! The HTTP API, as we’ll call it, is about 30% of the cost of a normal API Gateway with slightly less functionality but improved performance. It’s certainly worth a look.

The next announcement revolved around using events within applications in AWS. Event based applications pass data between parts of the application using events and events queues. EventBridge is a serverless event bus and events are generally JSON messages passed between part of a system. A new feature for EventBridge was introduced, Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry, which can be used to store schemas and generates code to allow these events to be manipulated in code on common languages.

The last session of the day covered how Amazon organise themselves to innovate quickly. Concepts such as self-organising teams were covered. Teams are made responsible for delivery and support of a microservice. A team is responsible for everything from requirements, implementation, testing, deployment and support, including out of hours support. A team is generally referred to as a two pizza team as it should be roughly the size such that two pizzas could provide a meal to the entire team. Various other organisational considerations were also covered and it seems that this approach to organising work allow Amazon to reduce ‘time to value’ which is a key metric for the business.