Serverless is gaining popularity, with its applications limited only by a developer’s imagination, prompting even traditional companies to embrace it. However, with these new possibilities come new challenges, and we love to share creative solutions that address them with you.
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.
Johnathan Ishmael - Optimising serverless for BBC Online(2024) on bbc.com
We came across a series of insightful articles exploring how the BBC Design+Engineering team rebuilt BBC Online from the ground up, preparing it for the future.
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
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.
Part 3: Optimising serverless for BBC Online by Johnathan Ishmael, Lead Technical Architect - BBC