Serverless Craic Ep40 AWS, What’s New?

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

AWS, What's New?

We are post AWS re:Invent. To sum up, it was about the next generation of cloud focused on delivering value quickly by removing barriers to business adoption and enablement. This year there was a solution focus. Previously there was a focus on migration.

On Day 1 SiliconAngle published an article called "AWS chief Adam Selipsky hints at the next-gen cloud". He looks at classic cloud versus next-gen cloud. Classic cloud is infrastructure as a service and the platform of the cloud. And next-gen is looking at ISVs and true cloud. It's about using the cloud to power you business journey. Which is exactly what we talk about in The Value Flywheel Effect!

AWS are market leading for low level cloud primitives. If you want compute, get it from AWS. It has been this way for the last 15 years. But next generation cloud is about business capability. When you do Wardley mapping correctly, cloud primitives are pushed to the right to become commodities. You then look for the business capability you need. That's exactly what the value flywheel effect is. You look at your business strategy and decide what you need to use versus what you need to build. You use technical strategy to build the right thing. And you're not stuck using something that someone else is going to expose as a SAS.

AWS are consolidating core primitives and opening up the solution space to help customers do interesting things with them. And you can see that with the partnerships they are setting up with other big companies like Mongo and CloudFlare. It's becoming an ecosystem. There has been a lot of criticism of AWS in previous years with regards to their developer experience. Code catalyst is a big move from AWS to try to make that more seamless. It stitches together a number of things that have evolved over the last while. But it's really about enabling product teams to rapidly deliver value in a way that doesn't blow up three months down the road. It's an accelerator for teams coming on to the cloud or into serverless. And it is frictionless developer experience. In our book, it's the next best action phase of the value flywheel.

Well architected featured heavily at AWS re:Invent. AWS are continuing to develop well architected and build it into things. And they are continuing to develop patterns, blueprints and accelerators.

Security also featured with verified permissions. It's out in pilot at the moment but it has potential to make a big impact on managing fine grained permissions and doing identity authorization properly, especially if you have a custom app. Most companies of a certain scale have their own custom built version of this. So they have spent a lot of time and effort. But you need to acknowledge that you are ahead of the curve. And have the courage to delete your custom built solution. Deleting code is a good idea!

There's a bunch of step function stuff out. I particularly like SnapStart which gives you the ability to drop large java applications into lambda. And performance time is through the roof. You can draw up an average Spring Boot application into lambda and you will get similar performance but it's way cheaper to run. It's not just java, there will be other languages as well. It's snapshotting a virtual machine and making it available on demand, which is a big deal. There are some caveats to it. But it's addressing the myths around cold starts and using lambda for high performance workloads. It's also interesting from the perspective of having large framework oriented services and leveraging those for femoral compute.

At AWS re:Invent, the message I was hearing loud and clear is that enterprises and large companies have moved to the Cloud but need help doing the next piece. They need help creating their value flywheel. They've done the move and now need to go to the next stage of modernization or next-gen. So that is good news for our book 'the Value Flywheel Effect'. Because we tell you what to do. I spoke to a lot of people who were trying to do a serverless transformation. And trying to create their value flywheel. There's definitely a lot of demand for more advice and guidance. And stories of how companies have done this.

The ecosystem has never been better for applying the value flywheel effect now. A lot of the challenges we had in the past have started being addressed. So it should be easier for people who are adopting it now to make progress. In the past, when we promoted being well architected and serverless first, people looked at us a little funny! But it's starting to permeate throughout AWS. It's an accepted term and people understand what it means. There's a lot less inertia going well architected and serverless first. Compared with what we experience six years ago. Serverless first is not scary anymore.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
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