Episode #30: What to expect from serverless in 2020 with James Beswick

Serverless Chats

About James Beswick:

James Beswick is a Senior Developer Advocate for the AWS Serverless team. James works with AWS's developer customers to understand how serverless technologies can drastically change the way they think about building and running applications at massive scale with minimal administration overhead. He has previously worked as a Software Developer and Product Manager at various enterprises and startups, and has nearly a decade of experience building applications in the cloud.

• Twitter: @jbesw
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbeswick/
• Email: [email protected]

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with James Beswick. Hey, James. Thanks for joining me.

James: Hey, Jeremy. Good to see you.

Jeremy: So you are a senior developer advocate at AWS. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you've been doing on the AWS developer advocacy team.

James: Sure, so I've been working with serverless for about three years now. So I'm really a self-confessed serverless geek. I've used it to build quite a few applications, front to back using only serverless. And then in April last year, I joined AWS in the developer advocate team, and so this is truly the best job in the world because I like talking about serverless to people, so I get to go around doing conferences, blog posts, webinars, applications, and also some other things to show people how to build things. Since then I've just been going all over the place doing these things, but it's been pretty amazing just to see what customers are building all over the place with these tools.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right, so I was talking to Chris Munns when I was out at re:Invent, and I put together a podcast there, and we were talking about all these new things that AWS was launching. And I think what happens with serverless is that it's moving so fast that things are constantly changing. There's always new things being released. What serverless is is still up for debate, right? I mean, there's still a lot of questions around that.

So I wanted to talk to you because you and I talk as much as we can because I love talking to you. You have great insights when it comes to this stuff, and I wanted to talk to you about sort of what are we going to see with serverless in 2020, right? Because this is the year now where all of these pieces are starting to come together. We've got all of these tools, all of these things we've been complaining about like RDS Proxy, and we can't do this, and we can't do that. These problems are going away at a rapid clip. Maybe you can give me your take just on, I mean, what does 2020 look like for Serverless?

James: It's a great, great question. In the last five years, you know Lambda's really five years old, what's been happening is the space has been emerging and developing so quickly, we're simply seeing customers pick up the tools and build things and then find they need more features. So we've been building all these features as quickly as possible. And I think what's different this year is that this whole space is starting to mature very rapidly. And we're seeing customers, both startups and hug enterprises using all of these tools at scale. And starting to see the same patterns emerging from their use cases.

So what we're doing for the next 12 months is essentially looking at the entire list of requests that's coming right from customers where they want certain things and dedicating those resources to building out the features they want. So AWS is famous for listening to customers and building those features, but I'd say in serverless, I mean it really is the case their entire road map is coming back from these early adopters and these users and helping us to find what we now build.

Now in terms of actual concrete things, most of that comes down to improving performance all the time, always making sure we can make performance as good as possible but also improving tools and making sure that we integrate with developer tools that they're using all the time, and just making sure that all features, we sand off any rough edges that we have. So a lot of the time with AWS features, what we're doing is we deploying them out to customers as quickly as possible so that people get the first look at what we're building. And then when we get that feedback, then we build the additional bells and whistles to make sure it's exactly what people want.

Jeremy: Yeah, no that's great. And the other thing that I, I keep hoping for this, right? And maybe we're not there yet, and I ask everybody about this, but I really want serverless to go mainstream, right? Like it's just what you're doing. It's the way to build cloud applications, right? Because I think you have all of these use cases that are out there now, and from my newsletter I'm always trying to capture use cases to say oh someone's doing this with it or someone's doing that with it, and they have these interesting ways of solving those problems.

And like I said, these problems now have official solutions in many cases. What's your take on this idea of it really becoming mainstream and more customers starting to use it for, or just being the first choice of what to use when they're building something in the cloud.

James: So in my career, I've been one of these early adopt people where I was one of the first in the cloud. And I used mobile and got into mobile development very early. And one of the patterns I see over and over is that the tipping point of things becoming mainstream isn't always obvious. You go through this period where it seems like you're always walking uphill to convince people that this is something that's going to become the standard way.

And then magically at some point, it just does, and you didn't notice it happening. And I started to feel that's becoming the way of serverless because many of the groups I spoke to a couple of years ago, who didn't know what serverless was or they didn't think it was a good fit for their use case, are now starting to openly talk about serverless as an option at least and yet discuss how they could use it.

The great example is that last year I went to the DC Public Summit for AWS, where all of the government customers were there, and a lot of people were very interested in serverless. And I've seen the same thing at all the summits and events we go to that even people who haven't actually done anything yet are interested in what it can provide in terms of both agility and scalability for building their applications.

Jeremy: Awesome. So you mentioned tools and giving people tools in order to build stuff. One of my complaints from serverless, right from the beginning, is even though we are abstracting away all of this infrastructure, there's still a lot of configuration that has to happen. And with AWS that comes down to ultimately using either cloud formation or writing complex interactions with the APIs, which nobody wants to do.

So the CloudFormation side of things, there are extractions on top of that. We've got SAM, the Serverless Application Model that is, makes it a little easier. It's very similar in fell to the serverless framework. Then we have the CDK, which is relatively new that allows you to just write code, and that will generate an infrastructure for you. There's Amplify. I just talked to Nader Dabit the other day. We were going through this amazing tool that is Amplif...