Using serverless functions for real-time observability
summary
A custom retriever column store (ClickHouse-like) moves older shards to S3 and farms queries to AWS Lambda + S3 workers so interactive queries cover months of data; the system reaches petabyte scale with ~50k prewarmed workers, P90 ≈ 2.5s, and retrying slow S3 reads. Key tradeoffs: Lambda is ~3–4×/ms vs EC2 but wins on utilization, payload and request costs matter, and arm64 cost saving ~20–30% requires architecture builds, profiling and batching.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to serverless
- 1:08Defining the use case
- 3:26Observability and flow
- 7:22Architecting for scale
- 11:51Tearing and storage strategy
- 15:49Serverless for query compute
- 18:41Scaling and concurrency limits
- 22:40Cold starts and optimization
- 28:11Cost management
- 31:50Migrating to ARM64
- 35:51Performance engineering
- 41:14Conclusion and best practices
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