Digital Solutions (DS) enhanced the technical capabilities of its Innovation Delivery (ID) and Solutions Enablement (SE) teams by conducting a technical workshop on AWS Serverless Technologies at IRRI Headquarters in Los Baños on August 18, 2026. AWS Technical Account Manager Carl Alarcon led the workshop.
This capacity-building session was designed to help DS staff understand and use serverless technologies, such as Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Serverless technology enables teams to focus immediately on building solutions that provide value without having to spend a significant amount of time building and managing the required infrastructure.
The workshop focused on the technical theme of event-driven architecture, where applications react to specific events or requests, instead of consuming continuously running computing resources. This allows DS developers to build tools that are highly-performant but costs less due to the fact that they are only running when being used.
The team gained useful knowledge for deciding when and how serverless services can be integrated into current systems by learning about various serverless application patterns during the workshop. It extends the team’s technical capabilities beyond conventional infrastructure-bound workloads, and opens up further possibilities for building scalable and resilient applications.
This initiative supports the Solutions Enablement (SE) team’s longer-term goal of reducing dependencies on workloads that are up and running 24/7. The deployment of appropriate functions onto managed serverless services can contribute to reducing infrastructure and operational expenses, while still preserving the resources necessary for sustaining business applications.
Serverless technologies can also satisfy performance requirements for computationally intensive but seasonal functions. With built-in scaling and resilience, they enable resources to adjust to changes in demand, reducing the need to maintain excess capacity during periods of low usage.
As a next step, DS will continue the technical discussions through a deep dive into the different applications within the Enterprise Breeding Systems (EBS). The team will identify functionalities that may be suitable for migration to serverless technologies, assess their technical requirements, and determine where the approach can provide practical improvements in scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency.
In general, the workshop advances DS’s technical readiness to assess and adopt modern cloud architectures, while supporting EBS sustainability and cost-effectiveness goals.