BBC Online — A year with serverless

BBC reviews its first year running critical web services on 'WebCore', its shared serverless platform.

• •WebCore processed 3.3 billion serverless function invocations in February 2022 with zero operational incidents caused by the underlying technology
• •30% of BBC pages have migrated; personalized pages render in ~500ms invoking ~30 Lambda functions, with React taking ~150ms of that
• •145 million requests were personalized in February 2022, representing 6% of WebCore traffic
• •Editorial content update latency dropped from 2.5 minutes to 30 seconds; target is under 5 seconds
• •CI/CD build times fell from 24 minutes to 5 minutes by running build steps concurrently on serverless pipelines
• •A noisy-neighbor problem caused latency spikes on hour and quarter-hour marks, identified and resolved with the cloud provider