Serverless Craic Ep18 Modern Cloud Architecture for Developers

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

We're continuing our conversation on Modern Cloud. There are a couple of previous episodes: an overview of the CEO's perspective and an overview of Product's perspective.

I figured we would look at the Developer perspective today. This ties in with our 'next best action' or 'bias for action' concept. Sometimes when you meet with developers, you don't know what's working or not. By mapping out the tech stack, it's easy to spot things that are in the wrong place. In the modern cloud, capabilities are evolving and merging rapidly. So mapping out your tech stack and understanding what's available in a modern cloud environment is very valuable.

You can have a conversation with your teams on the components of the tech stack and see if there are more advanced modern cloud capabilities to take advantage of. Is there a managed service capability that can offload some of the burden in our tech stack? Can you leverage DynamoDB, step functions or some other evolved modern cloud capability to meet those needs?

It's a cracking exercise to involve business or product people who don't understand the full value stream. Typically in organisations, investment is done at the UI or UX level. Perhaps they want to make a change but don't really understand the level of complexity that's involved. A map can be a vehicle for a conversation to get investment to replace a legacy part of the platform. With mapping, you can't change everything there and then, but you can plot a path. It's a good way to set goals, look for opportunities and work towards those goals.

I like to do that very early with squads and look for opportunities for the year ahead. What areas need investment for modernization or to move up a level? It's a really good approach to have a joined up and holistic conversation.

As well as having that conversation as a team, you're implicitly putting the concept of evolutionary architecture into everyone's head. In other words, it's okay to keep changing. There isn't a sunk cost fallacy where we hang on to something for years, because we built it. What you also need from your tech stack is rapid delivery. You want your engineers to deliver features into production quickly. There's lots of ways to do that. One way is by using decent developer patterns like CDK patterns.

Composable building blocks are critical for rapid delivery. In the modern cloud with Product Leader needs and CEO needs, speed is key. You need proved patterns to compose your solution from. With the emergence of infrastructure as code, CDK, SAM and other infrastructure code capabilities, you can bring expertise and patterns to your teams to rapidly stand up solutions. For example a single page app pattern is a building block that can be deployed. Or an API gateway that connects to a new SQL database with step functions in the middle to do workflow.

Pattern collections have exploded over the last couple of years. With modern cloud, you should be able to find a well proven pattern that you can leverage or customize to your needs. And you are rapidly delivering value. Sometimes people think rapid means poor quality! And if you're going to build with those patterns, then you need to build quality in! You actually need to start by having a high standard of technical excellence to make sure those patterns have quality attributes, in the first place.

When you are talking about modern cloud, serverless, and leveraging managed services, a lot of things shift left. There's a lot of responsibility on the squad to assemble things to meet certain standards in the organisation. Building up squads is a huge aspect. You start off with the basics and get your observability set up which takes time, and you will go slow. But it's amazing, because after one or two months, you begin to see the philosophy creep in and before you know it you're ten times what you were at the start and you've got all the confidence in the world. The engineers are empowered and they're very creative.

With continuous architecture you've got everything you need to confidently pivot and deliver rapidly. As a developer, you've got to invest in continuous education and continuous learning. We've benefited massively from following the right people on Twitter and subscribing to YouTube channels to watch videos as well. It pays dividends. If you have mapped your tech stack, have situational awareness and if you are leveraging modern cloud properly, you can apply the features that are being announced today. That is the differentiator for your team and for your business. You have happy developers! Nicole Forsgren describes it in her 'Accelerate' book: if you invest in your team to make them go fast and safely, then employee engagement shoots up. It's quite hard to explain because some people see it as money spent. But the business benefits at the other end.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

theserverlessedge.com
@ServerlessEdge