Paul Johnston is an expert in serverless technologies and was formerly the CTO of a serverless startup. In the document, he discusses whether serverless is truly the future and compares it to container-based architectures. While containers can allow for increased deployment efficiency and scale, serverless architectures require less maintenance overhead and management burden. Serverless solutions are also more cost-effective since the provider manages the underlying infrastructure. Overall, Johnston argues that serverless will be the future for most use cases due to its automation, high availability, reduced complexity, and increased feature velocity compared to managing one's own servers and containers.

1. Serverless is the future.
(Or is it?)
Paul Johnston @PaulDJohnston Medium/Twitter

2. Paul Johnston
Twitter and Medium: @PaulDJohnston
Discuss Serverless / Being a CTO /
Climate Change
Interim CTO/Consultant (currently
available)
Ex-AWS Senior Developer Advocate for
Serverless
Co-founder JeffConf and ServerlessDays
Former CTO of Movivo - one of the
world’s first Serverless startups

3. Cloud, Data Centres and
Energy

4. Future of Cloud and Climate
Data Centres currently 2% of Global Carbon Emissions (at least)
Growth of Cloud/Data Centres likely to grow by at least 5x in next 7 years
Efficiency is irrelevant due to Jevons Paradox - increased efficiency leads to
increased demand)
Not just climate, but energy security - energy price rises
Whitepaper written by Anne Currie and myself (to be released soon)

5. ETHICS WHITEPAPER - THE STATE OF DATA
CENTRE ENERGY USE IN 2018
bit.ly/2024wp

6. https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

7. Please sign the pledge
(and move to sustainable cloud/DCs)

8. Movivo
Became CTO in 2015
Android App + AWS Lambda
By early 2017 was in 20+ countries with
over 500,000 MAU
AWS bill was around $300/month (half
was data backup)
Team of 2 serverless and 2 android
developers in total

9. Movivo
Heavily used Terraform
Lots of managed services
☹ 1 instance for fixed IP proxy to
Lambda
100+ functions deployed
No RDBMS - Primarily DynamoDB and
Athena
Dev envy + Staging + Prod + CI +
GitHub

10. So why didn’t I use
Containers?
(it was 2015 after all)

11. Lazy Pragmatism

12. Serverless

13. What is Serverless?

14. It’s the NEXT BIG THING!!!

15. THE SECOND COMING OF
CLOUD

16. Let’s get beyond the
hype and FUD*
*I was CTO of a serverless startup for 2 years

17. NOT the “Serverless
Framework”

18. NOT PaaS *
* Just because you don’t manage the server doesn’t make it serverless

19. PaaS v Serverless

20. NOT FaaS *
* not just FaaS

21. NOT -insert favourite open
source FaaS solution here- *
* again not just FaaS

22. My point?

23. It’s not about the technology
(and the word Serverless is VERY unhelpful)

24. Event Driven Architectures?

25. On Demand compute?

26. No Maintenance?

27. Micro/Nano functionality?

28. A definition…

29. …ok ok *my* definition

30. – Paul Johnston (2017)
“A Serverless solution costs you nothing to run
if nobody is using it (excluding data storage)”

31. Economic not Technological

32. Why does it matter that the
definition is economic not
technological?

33. Economic makes it about
business

34. How we used to do it
Physical Servers
Virtual Servers
Instances
Managed Instances
… and Containers

35. How we used to do it
Physical Servers
Virtual Servers
Instances
Managed Instances
… and Containers
All the same underlying
paradigm

36. Services and APIs
Sockets
Interfaces
Web Services
APIs
SDKs
REST

37. Services and APIs
Sockets
Interfaces
Web Services
APIs
SDKs
REST
Avoid the complexity of “how”

38. Evolution in tech always tends
towards Complexity Reduction

39. Make things easier

40. Evolution
Physical Servers
Virtual Servers
Instances
Managed Instances
… and Containers
Remove Hardware Management
Programmatic Management
Auto scaling/Orchestration
Application Portability

41. And Serverless?

42. My Opinion?
Serverless = evolutionary leap

43. * More than FaaS

44. So… let’s talk about containers

45. This talk could have been
called…

46. Serverless v Containers

47. Containers
cgroups (resource isolation) - 2007
Docker - 2013
Kubernetes - 2014

48. Why Containers?
https://cloud.google.com/containers/
Containerisation allows … development teams to:
• Move fast
• Deploy software efficiently
• Operate at unprecedented scale

49. Is this true?

50. well… not exactly

51. …it depends what you’re
comparing against

52. I asked a friend what tech you
needed to run Kubernetes

53. This next slide is all off the top of my friend’s
head…
Caveat: may well not fit your use case

54. Containers and…

55. What does it all do?
• Service mesh
• Service discovery
• Key/Value store
• Monitoring
• Logging
• Secure storage
• Package management
• etc…

56. Batteries not included
• Web servers
• Proxies
• Database servers
• Caching
• Application stack
• Analytics
• … and a whole lot more

57. And you have to manage it all!

58. https://gravitational.com/blog/kubernetes-release-cycle/

59. Lazy Pragmatism

60. Remember, I’m all about…

61. Compare to Serverless

62. (Economic not Technological)

63. (I’ll use AWS as an analogue)

64. AWS Serverless
AWS Lambda API Gateway DynamoDB S3
SQS Kinesis Step Functions IAM
CloudWatch
Cognito

65. Serverless basics v k8s basics
AWS Lambda
IAM
CloudWatchS3

66. Uptime and maintenance is
somebody else’s problems

67. So… does this allow you to

68. “Move Fast”

69. Serverless beats Containers
• Similar CI/CD patterns
• Easier deployment with serverless (debatable but fewer moving parts)
• Easier management with serverless
• Harder architecture with serverless (unless you know distributed systems)

70. … what about

71. “Deploy software efficiently”

72. In one sense…
• Deployment of containers FTW
• Deployment is independent of environment
• Except…

73. http://turnoff.us/geek/before-devops-after-devops/

74. Serverless beats Containers
• You don’t have to maintain the containers as well as the code (feature
velocity increases)
• Providers manage maintenance (security win)
• Efficiency is increased when you only have to manage one aspect

75. … and what about

76. “Operate at unprecedented
scale”

77. So here’s the thing…

78. Who does that?

79. No Seriously…
Who does that?
(apart from Netflix and Apple and Amazon etc)

80. Well architected serverless
solutions scale out of the box

81. For the 99% Serverless Wins
• Serverless scales for most scenarios really well
• If you’re that big (the 1%) then you can probably build a big team so do
containers
• Even then why would you?

82. Oh! One thing…
• Serverless is built on Containers
• Containers are still important
• Managed Services will negate Containers
• We will always need Containers… for the 1%

83. Serverless Wins
• Increased Automation
• High Availability by Default
• Reduced Management Burden
• Decreased Complexity
• Increased Feature Velocity (no management headaches)
• Increased Security
• Increased Resilience

84. BUT…!

85. Serverless isn’t necessarily
easier

86. Serverless Thinking
• Use a service whenever possible (because services are cheaper than people)
• Local development is much less important (or useful)
• Constraints are not bad (e.g. FaaS python version, memory and cores)
• It’s easier with Greenfield but can have real value in replacing elements of legacy
applications
• Aim is to avoid running your own servers as much as possible
• Vendors mostly have better engineers than you do
• It’s an infrastructure solution not an application solution

87. Lock In? PICK A VENDOR

88. Don’t tell me legacy is hard with
serverless because it’s hard with
EVERYTHING ELSE TOO

89. So Serverless…

90. Is Serverless the Future?

91. Is Serverless the Future?
Yes

92. Is Serverless the Future?
Yes (imho)

93. Cloud, Data Centres and
Energy

94. Fixing Climate Change is the
hill I will die on
(and with climate change, we’re all going to die on hills)
– Paul Johnston (2018)

95. Serverless is what I do for work

96. https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

97. Paul Johnston
Thank you!
Serverless Best Practices: bit.ly/
serverlessbestpractices
Sustainable Servers by 2024: https://
www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-
by-2024 (or google it)
Interim CTO/Consultant (currently
available)
Twitter and Medium: @PaulDJohnston
paul@roundaboutlabs.com