Datscape podcast episode 13 - serverless computing—the next evolution of Cloud Systems

In this episode we will be talking about serverless computing otherwise also known as ‘functions as a service’. Now if you’re a data person, before you change the channel, stick around for 60 more seconds! The reason we’re going to talk about serverless computing is because it’s very important; it is possibly the next iteration of cloud and as usual, we’re going to come at things from the data based perspective. While serverless computing isn’t going to replace everything (and there actually are of course, servers involved), with the next evolution it’s something we all need to know at least a little bit about.

To prepare for this episode, I searched my network and found an expert who is joining me today, his name is Mike Roberts. Mike is an engineering leader who has called New York City home since 2006. During his career he’s been an engineer, a CTO, and other fun places in-between. Mike is a long-time proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is passionate about the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. He sees Serverless as the next evolution of cloud systems and as such is excited about its ability to help teams, and their customers, be awesome.

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Key Points From This Episode:

Mike gives us a brief overview of his career to date.
Hear how Mike has been focusing on the whole server less area.
Learn about Mike’s company Symphonia, a consulting business dedicated to serverless and cloud architecture.
Understand how serverless computing covers a number of areas.
Discover how back end of a serverless covers things like cloud based databases and online user manager services.
Hear how Dynamo DB and Amazon S3 is both serverless.
Learn the five key components of serverless.
Find out how when you’re using a serverless service it automatically provisions.
Understand why the underlying server less service has to scale on demand.
Discover how costs are tied into the automatic scaling.
Hear how with Amazon Lambda you get billed by the hundred milliseconds of execution time.
Learn how serverless service has implicit high availability at the service level.
Find out why you don’t need to go serverless top to bottom, hybrid architecture is a real thing.
Understand why you need to understand the scaling differences between parts of your stack
Discover another type of used case for Lambda which is a synchronisis processing idea.
Hear about some common events that instantiate serverless code. Find out about google cloud functions and Microsoft Azure functions
Understand how attitude towards technology is defining whether people are using it or not.
Discover how to get product development to become more of an reactive idea to what we’re doing as opposed to a preset plan.
Hear what to do about tech debt when you’re constantly experimenting.
Learn why it’s perfectly okay to try out and experiment but if you want to keep it around you need to stabilize the code.
Find out why code will either be super new or super old and stable.
Understand why we should only stabilize what we know will be valuable through product experimentation.
Discover why having a good continuous delivery process is key.
Hear how Lambda functions run in the context of a public cloud.
Learn about all the amazing uses and benefits of docker.
Find out how problems happen with integration tests with serverless.
Understand how Mike embraces the cloud for development time testing and not just for production.
Discover how it has gotten easier to manage AWS accounts by thinking of it in isolation.
Hear how some things have account level limits that can affect your production behavior.
Understand back end data processing.
Discover why serverless is known for compute but serverless data is as important.
Hear what project Mike is the most proud of.
Learn what books Mike would highly recommend for people to read.
Find out why Mike can not function without Omnifocus.
And much more!

Connect With Today’s Guest:

Mike Roberts
Symphonia
Mike on Twitter
Mike’s Papers and Articles

Chris Presley

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