Serverless Transformation #34: Migrating a Seven-Year Old Legacy System

How does one of the world’s biggest companies handle the migration of a seven-year-old legacy system? This fascinating article on the Netflix Technology Blog describes the development of Cosmos – their internal tool for converting media files to work on all devices. 

Not only is the architecture intriguing (“microservices that trigger workflows that orchestrate serverless functions”), but there are plenty of glimpses into Netflix’s inner workings – such as “first-order goals”, a lack of top-down control, and what looks like a pretty sweet custom observability tool.

Related: have you read our article on minimum viable migrations?

We’ve all been in teams where backups are turned on and we think: job done, the data is protected.

However, Anna Anisienia suggests that this isn’t enough – and gives ten actionable suggestions to really protect your data. This includes understanding the business needs of your data backups, the difference between RPO and RTO, and actually testing your backup and recovery strategy.

Although the Well-Architecture Framework is a great tool to build high-quality systems, it can sometimes be hard to explain the value to business stakeholders.

In our experience the easiest way to show that value is to graph it. In this article, Tom McMeekin shows us how we can use QuickSight with the new AWS Well-Architected Tool APIs to automatically create those graphs for you.

We’ve all been there: someone’s found a bug on prod even though it worked exactly as expected on your machine.

While our instinct might be to tweak our local environment to mimic production, Emrah Samdan suggests that we should embrace developing and debugging directly on the cloud. (And with Serverless stacks being cheaper and faster than ever to set up, it’s hard to disagree…)

Speaking of debugging: X-Ray tracing is now available for EventBridge! If you’re not familiar with X-Ray, it adds a trace ID to requests, so that you can follow them through all the different services you use. As you know, we’re partial to a nice event-driven architecture, so we’ve been waiting for this one for a while…

In other news, the Serverless London Meetup is back next Wednesday! James Beswick will be talking about event-driven architecture for Serverless, while Sarah Hamilton will be diving deep into building a scalable chat app using AppSync.