ADDO Adapting to Covid with Serverless

This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.