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Serverless

scale

State Januar 2019

Serverless architecture is now fully accepted in Haufe Group. More and more solutions and services use serverless technology. Despite the fact that serverless is highly cloud provider specific, teams prefer the technology cause it offers advantages regarding reduced infrastructure maintenance efforts and costs.
Therefore the classification changed from productize to scale.

Our projects

  • HRS The HRS team finished reengineering of the EDB (court decision database) based on serverless technology. Nils Rhode nils.rhode@haufe-lexware.com presented the approach and outcome at several conferences like AWS Summit, x-celerate and Haufe internal community days. You can find his presentation here.

  • Open Badges Server Haufe Akademie works on providing an Openbadge service for education certificates. Integration in the existing Akademie landscape is done with AWS serverless services.
    Contact Markus Lobreyer markus.lobreyer@haufe-lexware.com for more information.

  • myCenter
    myCenter extends the desktop applications Lexware reisekosten and Lexware fehlzeiten with a webbased client.
    The client uses a serverless backend (Azure functions).
    Contact Frank Laule frank.laule@haufe-lexware.com for more information.
  • VR Memorycards App
    The Memorycard App uses a serverless backend (Azure functions) to provide the topics and resources for the app.
    Contact Rainer Zehnle rainer.zehnle@haufe-lexware.com for more information.

Revisions:

productize | November 2017

Why?

AWS and Azure both provide the new exciting way of serverless applications/functions. Main features/promises are:

  • No worry about the infrastructure - no servers to manage
  • Pay-per-use pricing model
  • Continuous scaling

Servless technology enables developers to create small apps that are called on demand and to run these apps with minimal cost. Serverless functionality might be triggered by various sources like:

  • Http-Request
  • Timer-trigger
  • Database Trigger
  • Event Trigger

A primary benefit here is that maintenance effort for serverless infrastructure is highly reduced.

But, with the use of serverless technology the app is locked-in to a cloud provider. You cannot switch to a traditional hoster anymore or run the service on-premise.

Technology choices/solutions

Our projects

AWS Lambda - AWS serverless services

Foundational Services

The foundational services team is using AWS Lambda mostly for tasks outside the critical path. As a custom resource for CloudFormation, the serverless solution allows the team to manage all deployment aspects in an elegant way by deploying a new CloudFormation stack. Baking AMIs and doing green/blue switches are only two of the many use cases where AWS Lambda comes in handy.

In addition to deployment automation, the team is using AWS Lambda to process incoming data. Lambda can respond to events from various sources such as S3 Buckets, SNS topics, Kinesis streams, and HTTP endpoints. Also, it is a perfect match to process, transform, and forward incoming data in near-real-time at a fraction of the cost of running an ESB.

HRS

As part of the re-engineering of the EDB (court decision database), the HRS team takes a serverless approach by using AWS Lambda, AWS Step, and API Gateways to process many files. More than 500.000 files were processed in less than six hours in the initial import. Serverless computing is a good solution for this use case that occurs on a scheduled basis because it reduces computing costs.

Azure functions

Azure functions are used at Haufe-Lexware Real Estate to implement some REST-based Web-Services like News-Service and a Service to exchange data with partners.

HLRE plans to use these services in wowinex in the upcoming year - 2018.

It is fairly easy to develop in Azure functions. You have many choices regarding the development language. The key driver for the decision to use Azure functions was scalability. If services are not used, Haufe-Lexware does not incur computing costs. On the other hand, we must also be able to handle a growing number of customers and traffic.

Contact

Raul Firu raul.firu@domain.com, Rainer Zehnle rainer.zehnle@haufe-lexware.com, Frederik Michel frederik.michel@haufe-lexware.com, Nils Rhode nils.rhode@haufe-lexware.com