Journey to serverless
As you browse through LEGO.com, please remind yourself that the backend business services of LEGO.com run as serverless services on AWS cloud. Of course, there are SaaS platforms that these serverless microservices interact with and the frontend layer that runs on Fargate consumes these services and so on so forth. But the focus for us here in about those backend serverless services.
To set the context to what we are going to discuss here, LEGO.com was migrated to serverless from a typical legacy monolith ecommerce platform in July 2019. It was a fast paced 10 months journey and serverless made this migration a success. The implementation included many microservices and over 100 lambda functions in addition to many other AWS services.
LEGO.com was migrated to serverless in July 2019
You may have been through a similar journey or you may have come across with similar use cases sharing similar experience. For many such endeavours, especially for those that turn out to be a successful venture, achieving such milestones are always challenging and at the same time rewarding as well. This is all excellent and exciting!
What comes after serverless?
The curiosity is, what happens to these organisations or departments or teams that now adopted serverless and achieved what they were initially tasked to achieve? Is it as simple as proving a point with serverless or is there something beyond that? If you are with the ‘proving a point’ camp, then I guess life goes back to where you started, and you begin again probably with a different technology stack and the cycle continues. However, if you are brave (and motivated) enough to battle beyond the initial serverless adoption, that’s when your real life with serverless begins. If you prefer to call it Day One with Serverless then please go ahead and call it that way. Sounds charming!
“If you prefer to call it Day One with Serverless then please go ahead and call it that way!!”
I often say that agile, iterative and automated serverless development on AWS is like a gravity defying take-off. Once launched, there is no stopping!. There is more than one reason why I say that. We can easily find many convincing evidences to prove that point. And that is the Joy of Being Serverless!
Agile, iterative and automated serverless development on AWS is like a gravity defying take-off. Once launched, no stopping!
Acceleration
How well a post launch serverless situation will look in an organisation entirely depends on how much the organisation wants to accelerate ahead with serverless. Not necessarily everyone will have the same approach or the same priorities, but for those who are willing to accelerate with serverless, there are key areas where serverless comes to our help. We will see three such acceleration points that are possible with serverless.
1. Value Acceleration
2. Team Acceleration
3. Technology Acceleration
1. Value Acceleration
To me, this is the essence of going serverless. Both customer and business value acceleration that the serverless adoption brings is vital for today’s fast paced life. As Jeff Bezos once said, “Speed matters in business”.
Speed matters in business — Jeff Bezos
Any technology that can come to the aid of such movement is always welcomed by the tech industry. Serverless is one such technology that is very much primed for such an acceleration since its inception.
As customers, we live in an era where we demand to know everything around us every time and at every single instant. Technology helps us to know when a delivery driver enters our area, our street and precisely our property. This pushes business that offers the traditional order tracking services to a newer and differentiated level. In order for us to go along with such compelling ambitions, we need a technology that can journey with us to give the speed and agility. This is where serverless scores big time.
We need a technology that gives us speed and agility. This is where serverless scores big time
Taking that delivery tracking analogy, as a start-up or as a new feature, you are likely to start developing something that is a bare minimum MVP. You then quickly iterate and continuously enrich the feature and make that available to your customers. It will be hard to find an alternative technology that can help in such a situation to start small and scale fast.
That was just one simple example of the tremendous amount of opportunity serverless can bring to every organisation. Teams that have first-hand experience in serverless are now iteratively developing and scaling fast in delivering business value. Stakeholders and product owners become witness to this remarkable evolution and become more convinced and confident than ever before in approaching teams for faster solutions. When a technology is on your side, what are you waiting for? Great value of being serverless!
When a technology is on your side, what are you waiting for? Great value of being serverless!
2. Team Acceleration
Team acceleration is not something that is going to appear in your organisation by magic, but something that we all need to work towards to achieve. Many said it before and many will say this again that serverless needs a mindset and a change in attitude to succeed.
Serverless needs a mindset and a change in attitude to succeed
Mindset and a can-do attitude are necessary for you to enter into the game but from there you need a mind-shift to play the game. Serverless requires a mind-shift to see the products as event-driven orchestration of managed services, knitted with infrastructure code, to bring the best value to the business as well as the customer.
Serverless requires a “mind-shift” to see the products as event-driven orchestration of managed services, knitted with infrastructure code, to bring the best value
It is not often easy to develop that mind-shift, especially if you are coming from a traditional development background. This is when a serverless team environment can make you feel safe and rewarding. However, with the right guidance and with the right attitude, irrespective of the years of experience and the varied skillset, engineers can become diverse in their serverless knowledge and the devops skills. They grow to become what I call as Serverless Engineers. A Serverless Engineer is a software engineer who is innovative, efficient, capable of building secure, cloud first and cost effective functional solutions, iteratively using serverless services.
Serverless Engineer is a software engineer who is innovative, efficient, capable of building secure, cloud first and cost effective functional solutions, iteratively using serverless services
As you start growing serverless engineers in your organisation, the acceleration happens without anyone notices it.
- Engineers now understand serverless architectural patterns and constructs,
- they are eager to be part of architectural discussions and decision making process,
- they can visualise end-to-end serverless solutions they develop,
- they start to take ownership and pride in what they produce,
- they become curious to understand and take part in the integration and deployment processes,
- they are watchful of the post-production performance of their solutions,
- they don’t hesitate to be part of the on-call rota, and
- they reach out to the wider community and share their experience and knowledge.
Such a team no longer requires any special adjectives. They have simply become a force to recon with. An absolute joy of being serverless!
Serverless team can become a force to recon with. An absolute joy of being serverless!
3. Technology Acceleration
As I write this, the world is going through an unprecedented Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic of 2020. Amidst the loss of thousands of lives, locked-down world and human isolation, one thing that binds everyone together and keeps our hopes alive is the technology. From the depths of the bare network fibres to the heights of the cloud, modern technology is keeping us moving in this halted world.
From the depths of the bare network fibers to the heights of the cloud, modern technology is keeping us moving in this halted world
As echoed by George W Bush, we cannot do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow. It is extremely important and paramount to realise that, those who adopt the right technologies at the right times accelerate faster for better.
You cannot do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow — George W Bush
Serverless is one such technology that can stimulate the acceleration with its ecosystem of services. When it comes to choosing the right services, it can be overwhelming with the plethora of services on offer. In a positive way though, this is all well and good.
As a team, we need to identify these serverless services as they become available and evaluate the benefits they can bring to the business. One such service that came out not that long ago is Amazon EventBridge. EventBridge is such a cool service that offers so much now and promises so much more for the future.
Amazon EventBridge is such a cool service that offers so much now and promises much more for the future
Until recently, every serverless conversation started off with a ‘cold-start’ prayer. At times it felt an entire industry was built around to mitigate the cold-start syndrome. Fact is, none of those workarounds effectively offered the practical cure to the problem. Then came the radical improvements for those VPC campers and followed by the provisioned reservation for those who prefer to stay warm for ever. These may look lighter on paper but the undeniable benefits these bring to our serverless ecosystem are unmeasurable.
Acceleration is not always about scaling up and surviving the traffic spikes. The other side of the equally important serverless ethos is being resilient and fault tolerant. When technology enriches the error handling options and offers destinations to route your successes and failures to care for better, the development can move faster with visibility and courage. Power of being serverless!
Acceleration is not always about scaling up and surviving the traffic spikes. The other side of the equally important serverless ethos is being resilient and fault tolerant
Conclusion
Most of you are aware of the slingshot effect in space technology. This is when spacecrafts accelerate through the effect of gravity. When a cloud technology offers such a gravitational pull to accelerate our development, it would be naive not to fully catapult with it. After all, every business establishment out there strives to bring value to itself and to its customers, and fights ever so hard to survive in their value battles.
If serverless can be of that slingshot to give us the acceleration to win battles and bring value, then we must accept, adopt and of course accelerate to enjoy the true potential of being serverless!
Go Build Serverless!
Accelerating with Serverless! was originally published in LEGO Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.