In Serverless, as in software in general, the hardest part is always people.

1. The Hardest Part of Serverless:
The Serverless Native Mindset
AWS Community Day Boston, 2018-10-01
Ben Kehoe
Cloud Robotics Research Scientist
AWS Serverless Hero
@ben11kehoe

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2015

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7. 7
Going all-in on serverless:
worth the trouble!

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• We are a device company
• We are a cloud-connected device company
• We are not a cloud technology company
• We are a cloud-enabled-features company
• It’s not same thing
iRobot’s business

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What do you do as a business?

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• What do you do as a business?
• What differentiates you?
• For any work that is not a differentiator:
ask why you’re doing it
• Recursive: for any differentiating work,
look for non-differentiating aspects, and
ask why
• You shouldn’t have to solve technology
problems before you can solve your
business problems
Focusing on what you do

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Serverless is about focus

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• Attention is limited; focus is a tradeoff
• How can you pay less attention to
undifferentiated heavy lifting?
• Get someone else to do it
• Use managed services
How do we focus?

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• Often equated with Lambda
• This misses the bigger picture
• And the smaller picture
Understanding Serverless

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Attachment is suffering (for compute)

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Attachment is suffering (for compute)

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• Managed services have been around
forever
• But business logic has to go
somewhere…
• Managed rules engines exist
• But you can only get so far without
actually coding something…
• Ephemeral compute has enabled
providers to manage code
• Temporal: FaaS, streaming compute
• Input: managed batch compute
Why serverless compute isn’t just PaaS

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• Use (and abuse) managed services
wherever you can
• “Service-full”
• Glue it together with managed,
ephemeral compute
• FaaS is one example, but there are
others
Understanding Serverless

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What:
•Service-full + ephemeral compute
• Not always F, not always aaS
•Resources billed → resources used
•Smaller, more abstract control plane
Why:
•Lower cost
•Lower operations burden
•Faster time to market
•Focus on business value
Serverless: more than just FaaS

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Use existing managed services in
preference to building and/or hosting your
own solution,
even when those services don’t quite meet
your requirements

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Serverless is masonry.
FaaS is mortar.
Buy your bricks.

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• Attention is limited; focus is a tradeoff
• How can you pay less atention to
undifferentiated heavy lifting?
• Get someone else to do it
• Use managed services
How do we focus?

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• Conway says: your software
architecture will match your
organizational structure
• Turning this around: what you want to
do in software must be manifested in
your organization
Conway’s Law
(not that Conway)

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•Serverless is service-full
•The dominant architectural pattern is usage of managed services
•What does this mean for your organization?
•The paradigm of outsourcing undifferentiated heavy lifting must be
embraced by the culture
Conway’s Corollary for Serverless

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Using managed services is an exercise
in trust

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• You only know what the provider tells you
• Architecture
• Security
• Performance
• Metrics
• You can’t make changes to the service,
you must accept that (today) it is what it is
• You may not be able to remediate an
provider’s outage
With a managed service…

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• Using a managed service, you can feel
that you no longer own your own
destiny
• That is an uncomfortable feeling
• Realize that you rely on many, many
trusted providers to operate your
business
• Remember that trust is a journey
This is scary!

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• We are tinkerers
• We like to know how things work
• We like to own things
Giving up control is hard for developers

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“Not Invented Here”

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“Profoundly Found Elsewhere” (P&G)

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Serverless is minimalism

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•Meaning of “serverless”
•Kubernetes
•Multi-cloud/vendor lock-in
•SLAs
Distractions

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•It’s a terrible name. Nobody likes it, but we’re stuck with it, so get
over it.
•Like “cloud”, it is destined to be basically meaningless
•Primary metric for the “serverlessness” of something: how
managed is it?
•Secondary metric: how closely does my bill match my usage?
The meaning of “serverless”

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• There are two kinds of servers
• Infrastructure servers, like VMs
• Application servers, like Node.js
• You’re fully serverless only when both
are managed
• A container that is active when it’s not
handling data is a server
• A function that’s running on your
infrastructure is not fully serverless
Serverless sleight of hand

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• Kubernetes on managed VMs is
“serverless” for the k8s admins
• But you have k8s admin to do
• And management of whatever you’re
running on k8s
• Hosting FaaS on k8s: you have FaaS
operations and maintenance to do
• All of this is undifferentiated heavy lifting
Let’s talk about Kubernetes

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Multi-cloud

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• Should an SLA make you feel more
comfortable?
• As a developer, no
• An SLA is a financial guarantee, not a
technical one
• Essentially, it’s insurance, with the premium
baked into the price
What about SLAs?

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How do we adopt a serverless mindset?

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• Event-driven architectures are a natural
fit for serverless architectures
• Events are ephemeral by nature
• Transition away from long-lived
compute
• Easier transition to serverless
Events: a gateway drug for ephemeral compute

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• Serverless requires both:
• A level-headed assessment of risks
• A full accounting of costs
̶ Developer time
̶ Operations bill
̶ Operations time
• Your operations salaries should be in
the same budget as your cloud bill
Stay focused on Total Cost of Ownership

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• Example: provider outages
• What’s the impact?
• What’s the likelihood?
• What’s the cost of implementing a
remediation strategy?
• What’s the TCO for avoiding relying on
a provider?
Stay focused on Total Cost of Ownership

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• Get developers connected to the
business value they are creating
• Team metrics should reflect this
• Serverless helps developers move up
the stack, closer to user-facing features
• The hardest part: a culture that cares
about features, not technology
Encourage a focus on business value

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Rube Goldberg machines

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Building blocks

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Making it work

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• Serverless is extraordinarily powerful
• The difference in operations between all
serverless and mostly serverless is huge
• Less so for development
• What if you go all in?
• It’s not easy, but it’s worth it
Going all-in on serverless

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What:
•Service-full + ephemeral compute
• Not always F, not always aaS
•Resources billed → resources used
•Smaller, more abstract control plane
Why:
•Lower cost
•Lower operations burden
•Faster time to market
•Focus on business value
Summarizing Serverless

53. 53@ben11kehoe
What:
•Service-full + ephemeral compute
• Not always F, not always aaS
•Resources billed → resources used
•Smaller, more abstract control plane
Why:
•Lower cost
•Lower operations burden
•Faster time to market
•Focus on business value
Summarizing Serverless

54. 54@ben11kehoe
What:
•Service-full + ephemeral compute
• Not always F, not always aaS
•Resources billed → resources used
•Smaller, more abstract control plane
Why:
•Lower cost
•Lower operations burden
•Faster time to market
•Focus on business value
Summarizing Serverless

55. 55@ben11kehoe

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Serverless native: worth the trouble,
and it will only get easier

57. Questions?