The Serverless Team is driving innovation
The Serverless Team is a great way to summarize the changes in IT and the cloud over the last few years. We've come a long way! As a matter of fact Serverless Teams will make you even more productive and faster.
The Serverless Team is driving innovation
The Serverless Team is a great way to summarize the changes in IT and the cloud over the last few years.
From more and more higher level services in Cloud Providers, Serverless Infrastructure like Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) to Containers and higher level Container Systems we’ve come a long way. Today having to manage any kind of longer running instance in a cloud provider is optional for most workloads.
Shortly summarized the goals of the Serverless Teams are
- Solely focus on Product Development
- Faster development cycles
- Reduce undifferentiated workload
- Use higher level services
- Differentiated from Serverless Infrastructure
- E.g. ECS with Fargate in AWS
From Serverless Infrastructure to Serverless Teams
Looking at the term “Serverless” from an infrastructure perspective isn’t really that helpful anymore. The name has outgrown the complexity of available services and tools. Therefore it is more helpful to consider the team and if it works, manages and develops their systems with a Serverless approach in mind.
Well, of course in the end there are servers, of course if you’re running a Container in ECS Fargate (a Container Orchestration Service as in AWS) or a managed Kubernetes Cluster it is running on a server. But you’re not managing that infrastructure and an update to the Operating Systems means rebuilding the container and deploying a whole new artifact. That also means no more updating instances in-place, no more failing instances that are still in service. Everything needs to be fully automated from test to build to deployment to health check and shutdown. Nothing runs for a long time and only as much as you need runs at a time.
„With serverless teams and the right mindset, you can develop even faster!“
Serverless Mindset
From a development team's perspective it shouldn’t really make a difference and the team shouldn’t really be aware of the number of instances that a service currently runs. They are all autoscaled all the time with proper alarming if the min/max settings for your autoscaled instances is too low or too high. In the end does it matter if by running your workload in ECS with FARGATE you're not truly Serverless because something is running all the time? Who cares, your team certainly cares more about being more productive by using the tools they already know.
This approach making the team looking at their infrastructure through a Serverless lens creates the need for great testing and automation - for automated health checks and strict guidelines on deployment and workflows. IT also has the advantage that most things can be patched and updated quickly and with little cost. Undifferentiated workloads are put into higher level Cloud Provider Services and the team can fully focus on development.
Conclusion
Our focus should always be on how the team works with and perceives the infrastructure they are responsible for.
The less you have to worry about pitfalls that come with an infrastructure that doesn't automatically manage itself, the more you can focus on real improvements, making your team more productive and your business more profitable.
