Cloud 2.0: "Code" is no longer king - Serverless has dethroned it

Twitter/Medium: @PaulDJohnston
Cloud 2.0: Code is no longer
King - Serverless has
dethroned it
Why Serverless is the future of cloud

Paul Johnston
Experienced Interim CTO and Serverless
Consultant - linkedin.com/in/padajo
Former AWS Senior Developer Advocate for
Serverless
Environmentalist #ClimateChange
bit.ly/2024wp
Twitter/Medium @PaulDJohnston
Co-founder ServerlessDays (formerly
JeffConf)

When “Code” was
King

Code was the key
Since computers became key, software was the differentiator
Software developers became rock stars
And big companies like Microsoft became the big players

Open Source Rebellion
But the community rebelled
Software should be “free” we said
This led to things like Linux
And the LAMP stack
And ultimately to the Open Source world we have today

Cloud was inevitable
Commoditising virtual machines became the
norm - ask Simon Wardley
Taking the Open Source and turning it into
services
Making Developers even more powerful
Leading to books like the one written by Stephen
O’Grady from Redmonk
Developers were everything
Because Developers write code

Serverless blurs the
lines

Serverless is the next revolution
Serverless blurs Dev and Ops and a whole lot more
It shifts the role of the Developer from simply writing code
But what does it shift it to?
Let’s unpack what Serverless is...

Serverless Shift - AWS Lambda 2014

FaaS is not Serverless - it is the major enabler
On demand compute was not new in 2014
The key to AWS Lambda are the triggers
And the integration with the AWS ecosystem meant that Lambda enabled many
other applications
FaaS != Serverless

Definition of Serverless
“A Serverless Application is one that costs you nothing to run
if nobody is using it, excluding data storage costs.”
Paul Johnston, November 2017

Definition of Serverless
Economic not Technological
Developers need to think Business Value not
code
More responsibility in terms of understanding
scaling, demand, other services
Even though cost is mentioned, it is not about
cost savings
“A Serverless Application is
one that costs you nothing
to run if nobody is using it,
excluding data storage
costs.”
Paul Johnston, November 2017

“Infrastructure” is
King

Serverless and Infrastructure
Much more reliant on Vendor Services
Which makes it more important to be able to use tools such as terraform, SAM etc
Serverless is a bad name - serviceful?
What makes something serverless though?
How do you recognise it?

Serverless and LoC
Is Serverless about Fewer Lines of Code?
I think it is
Because Today’s Code is Tomorrow’s Technical Debt
That deserves it’s own slide...

Today’s Code is
Tomorrow’s Technical Debt

Serverless and LoC - Code is a Liability
This is definitely a key for me
Code is always a long term liability
In fact, I would suggest that there is an ultimate serverless application...

The Ultimate Serverless
Application Has
Zero Lines of Code

Serverless and LoC - Code is a Liability
How does that work?
You have a lot of configuration
Configuration isn’t code

Experience of
building Serverless
Applications

I teach people Serverless
(… mainly AWS Lambda with SAM)
How do I do it?
Most people get the idea really fast:
● Functions replace business logic
● Use various triggers to do the things you would normally do in code
● But the hardest part…?

Building Serverless Applications
Designing the overall Application - relatively easy
Coding the AWS Lambda Functions - easy
Interacting with AWS or 3rd party services - easy as there are lots of code samples
This sounds trivial…
The hard part? The configuration
Far more time is spent on that in the initial development phase than on any other

Infrastructure configuration is King
Once you’ve created your configuration though…
You have a system that other people are providing the support for scaling,
availability, monitoring, uptime, etc
The problem that developers have is that they don’t often see the business value

Days of coding
can save you
hours of Configuration
Borrowed from Ben Kehoe although I don’t know if it’s original

A quick point on containers...
The only thing I’m going to say…
You can’t really go “serverless” this way
You can go “towards serverless”
But really you have to be moving towards lower Lines of Code and Business Value
This really doesn’t do that in my view

The Serverless Shift

The Serverless Shift
From Code to Configuration
From Code to as few Lines of Code as possible
From Building Services to Consuming Services
From Owning Workloads to Disowning Workloads

The New (Serverless) Kingmakers
Maybe it will be…
Those who grasp the “Infrastructure is King” paradigm shift
Those who grasp that “Perfect code” is far less important than it should ever have
been
Those who grasp that Today’s code is Tomorrow’s Technical Debt
Those who grasp that Business Value is more important than their own technical
achievement

But… why do Serverless?
I realised something recently
My definition of serverless is lacking something...

What is missing? The “Why”
It’s not about app scaling
It’s not simply about reducing LoC, Technical Debt, Servers, MTTR although these
are very common side effects
The “Why” is simple...
It is faster to build new features
It is quicker to onboard new people
It is faster to recover from failures

Wait… you just said it took longer sometimes
I did!
A lot of developers are stuck in the idea of Software Development ending at
Delivery
I have a background as a CTO.
CTOs think about Application Development being the full lifecycle of the
Application

The Application Lifecycle
Applications are created
Then they are improved, updated, fixed, changed, and replaced
All of these things affect how easy or hard an application is to manage
A Serverless approach is by far the most effective solution I
have found for delivering a rapid pace of development over
the whole lifecycle of an application

Serverless is a rounding error
Serverless when done right is a rounding error
Because the focus, from the beginning, should be on costing nothing when nobody
is using it
If that is the focus, then the application should only ever be paying for data storage
And those costs are trivial when compared to the costs of your people

Serverless development teams tend to be smaller
And a note on the teams I’ve seen…
When I built a Serverless team, we had 2 people running an application running in
20 countries and 500,000 MAU
I know of VCs who are know starting to ask startups the question “Are you
running serverless?”
They are wanting to know whether they are getting value for money
Because developers who understand business value are going to spend their
money well

A New Definition of Serverless
“A Serverless Application is one that provides maximum
business value over it’s application lifecycle and that costs you
nothing to run if nobody is using it, excluding data storage
costs.”
Paul Johnston, April 2019, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

But… we lack the tools
We’re still using Cloud 1.0 tools
Testing is still assuming the use of servers - a whole other talk!
CI/CD does not really consider the idea of atomic deploys - another whole other
talk
Think about Visualisation, Observability, MTTR… - you get the point

Serverless is the Future
The direction of travel is already set
This is where the vendors are already going
Some people are showing the way
It’s way more than just FaaS
It’s so much more about understanding Business Value
So go forth and be serverless, because...

Serverless is Cloud 2.0

Cloud 2.0: "Code" is no longer king - Serverless has dethroned it

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