Serverless Architecture An Honest Conversation – Women in DevOps Meetup Panel

January 20, 2022

2 min read

The Women in DevOps community came together for our first Women in DevOps networking initiative of 2022, ‘Serverless architecture an honest conversation’ hosted by the lovely Sabrina Battiston.

Serverless computing has gained a lot of buzz over the past few years in the tech community, as well as its fair share of advocates, fans, and a few sceptics. But what exactly is serverless architecture, and what are its implications for your business or team?

During the discussion we were joined with three market leading experts, Danielle Heberling a Software Engineer from Tango, Ixchel Ruiz a Developer Advocate from JFrog and Jessica Chappell a Senior DevOps Engineer at Epistemix, who explored all sides of serverless.

The discussion began with Jessica showcasing an interactive live demo where Serverless was brought to life. Jess explained the architectural walk through of serverless functions with practical scenarios. The panel then explored the benefits of adopting serverless in relation to the enhanced functionality and not having to reinvent the wheel, with speakers in agreement that it simplified processes and the overall management of infrastructure.

We explored what serverless adoption looks like within different organisations and covered the costs associated with serverless. Our panel reiterated the importance of adopting a security mindset for serverless security best practices. Lastly, we uncovered how the serverless model has impacted our experts’ roles on a day-to-day basis, with improvements such as speeding up processes, enabling them to think in a more abstract way, and work collaboratively with their team.

We would like to thank our fabulous panel for their insights, as well as our wonderful platinum sponsor JFrog for the prize giveaway.

Speakers

Ixchel Ruiz

Developer Advocate @ JFrog

Ixchel is a Developer Advocate @JFrog. She has developed software applications & tools since 2000. Her research interests include Java, dynamic languages, client-side technologies, DevOps, and testing. Java Champion, Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, SuperFrog, Hackergarten enthusiast, Open Source advocate, public speaker, and mentor. Travels around the world ( sometimes virtually ) because sharing knowledge is one of her main drives in life!

Video Transcript

all right so welcome everyone to women
in devops we are live now
um we’ll give everyone a minute to get
signed in and situated
um here and let everyone make their way
to the webinar
um
as always we will have a fantastic
giveaway from jfrog which we’ll talk
about in a few minutes um
but in the meantime
um
is your coming in maybe everyone can put
where they are
logging in from in the chat box around
the world we always have a global
audience so it’s always really exciting
to see
where everyone’s coming from um
i’m in los angeles um it’s 9 30 in the
morning i’ve had one cup of coffee
so we’re doing okay so far
um
but jessica where are you joining us
from
i’m from i’m walking in from durham
north carolina it’s a beautiful 40
degrees and rainy outside looking
forward to some snow and
i’m on my fourth cup of coffee and i’m
ready for my first nap
there you go
i know i had heard y’all were having
some
some winter weather out there so
hopefully it doesn’t keep you all down
too long
perfect in a shower
in the office chair
yes
you won’t have to shovel any snow though
where are you joining us from hi
hi sabrina i’m joining from switzerland
so it’s um 6 p.m 6 30 actually but i’m
from mexico so a little bit far away
from home
perfect perfect is it 6 30
at night correct yes okay perfect just
making sure we didn’t do something very
cruel to you
[Laughter]
perfect perfect and danielle where are
you joining us from
i’m joining from uh just outside of
portland oregon so same time zone uh and
it is the lovely rainy overcast time of
year here
so very surprising
wonderful and ari last time you were
joining us from tennessee where are you
now
wow um actually i didn’t realize i
joined you from tennessee last time i’m
actually in tennessee today and i you
think i spent a lot of time here maybe
uh the moonlighting is a country music
star as i’m in nashville tennessee uh
that’s not the truth and i won’t sing
for you but uh i am in uh but i am in
tennessee uh with my family and uh
they’re having some fun for birthdays
and stuff and i am working from the
hilton so uh it’s a it’s a it’s a great
day here with a little snow and uh quite
cold actually
perfect perfect that sounds great well
um we’ve got some folks from indiana i
used to live in indiana actually so
hello everyone from there um i know
we’ve got folks coming in from la
uh new york so and
england as well so we’ve got like a
really great global audience here which
is really exciting
um
so
we’re already five minutes in so let’s
go ahead and get started um hi everyone
welcome to women in devops we’re so
excited to have you here um i’m gonna
introduce our panel in a bit more detail
in a few minutes and also let ari
present the jfrog giveaway um but if you
haven’t been with us before at women in
devops we are an online community um
dedicated to serving and celebrating
marginalized genders in the tech space
as always our webinars are open to the
entire community and free and today’s
webinar i’m really excited about our
topic because we collaborated with our
community to kind of come up with with
what we were going to do this month and
listening to what folks wanted to hear
about
um
and so i’m really excited about our
panelists as well they’ve
got incredible insights to share they’ve
spent so much time in the space
researching and working with serverless
so there’s really not a better group of
people to be discussing this with and
answering your questions
um
but yeah so the the only thing about
different about today
is that usually we have a networking
session afterwards and you’re probably
wondering where the networking link is
um because we’re having more of a
technical discussion and we’re going to
have an architecture walk through from
one of our panelists um and we want to
have plenty of time for q a we’re not
going to be doing the networking today
but we will have that back
um next time so don’t worry about that
um
and the other thing i wanted to point
out was we have um otter ai
for um subtitles and lucy has put in the
chat box to the right
um how you can
access that
so perfect um
we’ll be able to get through all the
panel questions have a great
architecture walk through with jessica
and be sure that we still have time for
um q and a but as always ari um has a
fantastic giveaway for us i’m really
excited to see what he’s brought today
so ariel let you take over and and talk
a little bit about that thank you so
much sabrina i really appreciate that
hi everybody i’m ari waller and i’m the
meetup event manager for jfrog and again
for 2022 we are so excited to be a
platinum sponsor for uh women in devops
i’ll just share a little bit about who
we are uh
jfrog is the devops software company
known best for artifactory which is
considered by many to be the gold
standard for managing your artifacts and
dependencies
now um tonight i’m actually going to
share a slide if i can do that
successfully here
um
please work here we go
a a really exciting um event that we
have coming to uh europe
next week
um we have our 2022 devops cloud days
and jfrog wants women and devops members
to devops members to get in for free
um devops cloud days is a three-day
virtual event showcasing content um from
jfrog microsoft azure
aws and google cloud one cloud provider
is going to be showcasing each day so
you can kind of pick and choose
throughout your workday which ones you
want to listen to it’s going to be
january 25th through the 27th
and um you can it will be demonstrating
how developers can simplify and
accelerate the deployment of their
applications so hopefully that’s
something that everyone can take
advantage of
as you hopefully can see on the slide
you can see the slide right
yes good good good
we have uh some great speakers uh
bridgette kramhout steve alaska and
brian benz just to name a couple um from
the azure team as well as our cto uh
johan landman who will be uh speaking
also so again we have a lot of great
material check out i’m going to drop
a link so you can register for free
and also you can use the qr code that
you see there but as another quick bonus
for tonight
we have a chance since we’re talking
about a technical topic for you to win a
for somebody to win a raspberry pi 400
complete pc kit now
i’m not sure if you’ve looked for one of
these before you can get them but they
only limit you to one so i have to
constantly get them from different
providers to get some um out to the
meetup community because the raspberry
pi 4s and all of their
accessories are a little bit difficult
to get so i would love to give this away
to somebody
in our audience today you can enter with
the qr code or the bitly link that you
see and i’ll also drop that in the chat
and a winner will be selected within two
business days um and then once the
winner formally accepts the prize via
email i will go ahead and share the
winner with the meetup community and on
social media so with that being said so
excited about the serverless discussion
today and uh sabrina i’m going to turn
it back over to you
perfect thanks so much ari and what a
great opportunity for our community with
devops cloud days and of course with our
giveaway that everyone’s always so
excited about every week so thank you um
and of course thank you to jfrog um
always being so supportive of our
community and making sure that we have
access to lots of opportunities
you’re all awesome thanks for all you do
thank you
okay perfect so um
i’ll go around and start introducing
everyone on our panel
um i’ll go ahead and start my name is
sabrina again i’m joining from los
angeles i co-founded women in devops
here on the west coast um and i’m really
passionate about building out our
community and connecting folks with each
other in the devops space
and furthering um
awareness about our movement
so jessica maybe i can have you
introduce yourself next
sure
i’m jessica i use she her pronouns i
am a senior devops engineer at
epistemics um we do agent-based modeling
for
epidemiological purposes i
been in devops for four years before
that i was
managing a food truck
with my spouse it was a lot of fun but
devops is just one
giant puzzle
to problem solve and i just can’t step
away from it now
so it’s a lot of fun
perfect thanks jessica and uh we’ll go
in the circle here michelle why don’t
you introduce yourself
hi hi again um well i uh support
developer and but now i started very
recently as a developer advocate
and that the reason why is because i i
even in the past i have been developing
software since 2000 so
i’m kind of a veteran here
um but i was very passionate about
sharing knowledge and helping fellow
developers into understanding and and
um yes in
in developing and
because of my heavy linux background i i
was always gravitating towards devops
like automatization
so
again
a little bit of experience there
perfect thanks so much and danielle
hey y’all i’m danielle i use she her
pronouns and i currently work for a
company called tango there’s a few
companies named tango so it’s actually
tango.us
currently we are a chrome extension
where you can
record workflows with screenshots and
directions
in seconds
ideal use cases for documentation to
teach people new things and really easy
to keep up to date so really excited
about that
it’s a fully serverless shop and i’ve
been working in serverless full-time
professionally for about five years so
probably in like serverless dog years
that might be more like 30. um
just considering that aws landa started
in 2014 if you use that as your baseline
but
not everyone does um and before
i worked in serverless i actually
started out as a
front-end software engineer and then i
migrated to containers and now i’m in
serverless
perfect thanks danielle i do feel like
uh the beginning of lab does probably
good benchmark
for the serverless timeline
perfect so um
we are really excited today because
jessica is going to take over now and
give us an architectural walkthrough um
of what serverless looks like and give
us kind of some practical case scenarios
for our community so jessica i’ll let
you take over the screen now
sure
all right
everyone see the screen
darn okay
all right so
today what i have
put together for you is just a
sort of simple walkthrough of
a cloud architecture that would route to
serverless functions with like a
back-end
we have an api with all the all the
back-end functions as serverless
um
basically
you’d have a um
it’s like a public network load balancer
where you would have your ingress to
your api
uh which would
this is i’m running this as
in this example this is running on
kubernetes and we have kong as our
ingress gateway
for
our services running on kubernetes
um
or
not running
because it’s serverless
uh but your our gateway is running on
kubernetes or
the entrance to our api and from there
istio is
a service mesh um and that part i would
say is optional
for
implementing here
servos functions but it’s very much a
nice
to have as you can connect all of your
services across multiple clouds and
essentially one large private subnet
with uh
mutual tls in between services
um
but if you wanted to skip that you could
route directly from your api gateway
this if you were in aw if you wanted to
use aws api gateway that’s fine too
and from there
we come into
cloud
we have a route for our api we’ll just
call it slash v1 and then that routes to
the k-native serving api k-native is
serverless functions um compatible with
any cloud provider they have run times
that you can
build base container images off of
and
from there you can
once you get to decay native you’ll
route to
based on the event
that you
define to trigger the function
it will
spin up the container probably the first
one takes probably two to three seconds
to spin up
but from there
it
is much faster probably two three
hundred millisecond latencies
um
for response times
um
from serverless functions you could also
use advanced lambda
um i feel like aws lambda
would be
is a great use case honestly um
i like k native because it just allows
me to stay a little bit
cloud agnostic
and i
enjoy managing infrastructure
so that’s uh
my own downfall here
but
uh from
once the
basically this just executes the
k-native functions will just execute on
your already running infrastructure
um
and would just auto scale out as you
needed and tear back down
as
the api traffic wound down
and then this is all kept internally
and
private
um from the cloud
and you just access it through
your network load bouncer and your nat
gateway
but um
yeah that’s a quick walk through
perfect thanks so much jessica and of
course if anyone has any questions at
any point um feel free to drop them in
the chat box there as well but jessica
really appreciate that walk through i
think um you know before we jump into
kind of the the high level uh
discussions here it’s just nice to have
a visual and and understand kind of what
we’re looking at
so that being said let’s just go ahead
and jump into our panel discussion um
and i think
our first question here is probably the
broadest question but it’s a good place
to start because it also helps us kind
of define what serverless is so
i’ll pose this question to the panel
just generally feel free to jump in but
what to you are the greatest benefits of
adopting serverless or serverless model
well
i may if i may start um
one of the
promises
that has been
made in our industry is to
do not repeat yourself keep it dry
focus on the functionality try to leave
boilerplate or repetitive tasks
outside of your mind as a developer and
because
we really really don’t like to reinvent
the wheel
and there’s a lot of things
in software development or in
applications
that can be um done
in a better way not by the developer
it’s itself
but by a single time and then we use it
so keep it right we used focus on the
functionality
there are applications that
that are
so
well or it can behave so well in a
serverless
environment for example if your
application has a lot of reading
then probably you want to scale the
written functionality more than your
writing or things like that
so
yes
i think those are the main benefits that
we can hear and they are true
for most
part
perfect i don’t think anyone’s going to
argue that automating and uh not
reinventing the wheel is a incredible
benefit here and definitely worth the
implementation uh danielle or jessica
did you all want to add anything to that
or elaborate
yeah i just yeah
you want to go jessica go ahead
oh sorry oh yeah i will um
yeah i feel like i can’t speak for you
all but for me sometimes my code can be
a really big liability um so if i can
take you know code that i would write in
say like a function
and offload it on some sort of cloud
service instead
i feel like i much trust
you know amazon google microsoft to get
it right than myself so i feel like
that’s a really big benefit of service
serverless is using those managed
services
i’d agree with that i
think
i’ll just reiterate it makes development
much
easier because
you’re not wearing all you are worrying
about is taking the event
that comes in and responding to it
and handling the event you’re not
worried about any ports
not worried about any
infrastructure at all
you
package up the function code
and you
zip poor container and it just runs
wherever you want it to
perfect so it sounds like they’re all
yes it sounds like there are plenty of
reasons that you would want to implement
serverless um danielle i’d love you to
go into a bit more detail about what
serverless adoption looks like um at an
organization i know you’ve got some
experience with startups um so maybe you
can go into a bit more detail and give
our community some insight into what
that change looks like
yeah i can speak to uh personal
experience from working at multiple
startups um another benefit of
serverless if you’re using you know true
serverless
services is that they tend to auto scale
so like for example at my current
company tango we were featured on a
website called product hunt
and got pretty big and we had a really
huge traffic spike and
as an engineer there it just auto scaled
and handled everything fine so i felt
like
for such a small team
not having to rush around and provision
extra servers
that has been a very big benefit
um and also too just from a startup
standpoint um
a lot of times we have to get mvps out
for the venture capitalists in order to
get funding otherwise our company is
dead
so like being able to hand hand that off
to we use amazon web services so like
being able to hand off a lot of that
stuff to aws
has given us time to build out our
actual product and focus more on the
customer value
and just like the flow of how everything
works
and
yeah particularly for smaller teams it
has been really great
i do know there are larger enterprises
that use serverless as well um
one that comes to mind is liberty mutual
i know a few people there so
not suggesting that it’s only for
startups but uh just speaking of
personal experience in regards to
startups
um i mean it sounds like a no-brainer at
this point so my next question is um are
y’all aware of any frequent or maybe not
frequent roadblocks but are there any
roadblocks to adoption that you could
identify or maybe have heard about in
the past or objections to adopting this
model
well as a consultant we always uh have
to say like it depends on the
application that you’re actually uh
trying to develop so that’s our your
first concern
uh in terms of
enterprises and companies i always say
that if you are not following the agile
process
then it’s going to be very tough because
um serverless
the sole concept is very very into agile
devops like you having a
cicd
um
culture already there
if you don’t have these two that are
huge
then
serverless it’s going to
be very very difficult so this too you
have to address first
and
decide if it actually matches your
problem or your application or your
solution
and if you are capable of implementing
this working uh culture
that’s great and i think
that kind of approaching the
considerations from two ways right
there’s a technical feasibility and then
there’s the organizational
like are we our processes in the right
place for this so um any other
considerations from jessica or danielle
um i know
i worked at a company that built uh
serverless tools and one of the biggest
uh concerns from people thinking about
adopting serverless was the concern of
vendor lock and
uh having to
you know
what if you know gcp goes down for
example and all my stuff is up there
um
that has been a main concern um
i i’m a little biased but personally i
think you know there’s lock in
everywhere beyond the cloud provider
like if you pick a programming language
like you’re locked in so i think a lot
of it’s really just
you know weighing the pros and cons and
what works best for your organization
and your team so
that’s true
i think i mean
it also
a roadblock to
serverless is can be it’s diffic really
difficult to
gain observation into your
um
your application
um
that is
probably
really depends on the application but if
you need those metrics i mean it’s hard
to get them out
at least
it
used to be extremely difficult it is
beginning to get easier now there’s
becoming a lot of built-in libraries
where you can ship logs and metrics
directly
from your
functions to
external services but
daniel’s right there is in everywhere no
matter what you’re doing you’re locked
into
some specific technology
that’s true we all know the the texts
and tweets that everyone gets when aws
goes down
all right perfect well um
uh after that i mean okay so we’ve
got a good idea of the benefit some of
the costs some of the roblox
implementations um of course uh from the
devops world we’re all going to be
interested like what does infrastructure
is code
look like with serverless so i was
hoping it shall you could go into a bit
more detail
kind of about that side
okay well
now we’re talking about that we can
focus on functions we can and have a
dynamic way or another wheel of
development
now we’re also
in the world that we can try things like
a b testing so we have to roll out
our new functionalities we have to react
very fast to what our clients or
prospective clients want or users
so now
because we have this culture we have
these tools and this way of working it’s
really easy to start um
having different environments for
testing uh
for
for quality for for performance etc etc
so now that we can have all these moving
parts
and
it is important that we also are able to
orchestrate this in a sensible useful
and fast way
so
and again and what jessica and danielle
were saying
um one of the worries is that we get
vendor looking so
there has been a lot of effort there’s
outside a lot of tools to
define
uh abstract in a
more or less
um
interesting way how we can
how we can um
create our different environments
keep them in a very simple way sometimes
they are agnostic to different
technologies sometimes they are not
because they are provided by the cloud
providers
um
so
infrastructural code is
how do we
in a simple way extract
the configuration of the different
environments so all our infrastructure
it’s easy to deploy we have transability
we have
visibility and
in
if we’re lucky
we can migrate between the frame cloud
providers in a sim in a simple way
so
that is infrastructure as code and if
you’re thinking about the the tools i
forgot about that there is several ones
um probably you have heard our terraform
ansible puppet
chef
so
yes
like anything else we can add to to that
point before we move on
sounds like we’re all good and i just uh
remembered that when we were talking
about the
the roadblocks to adoption
i also wanted to ask about the cost
we’ve been talking so much about the
cloud providers um does anyone have any
insights into kind of the cost models or
um
you know
what the
what the trade-offs are with you know
having a team doing this management by
themselves um or having the cloud
provider
um
managing the servers so um
you know as i’m sure a lot of us are
aware um
you know the tops of our companies are
always interested in how can we
be cutting costs so maybe someone can go
into a bit more detail because that’s
not something i’m i’ve really looked
into myself
um i think a really in terms of cost a
really big pro is uh pure serverless is
pay as you go
so you’re if you’re running you know
functions for example like you’re not
going to provision them and just have
them run and be paying for them you’re
just going to be paying per invocation
and as they’re running so a lot of the
serverless services are that way
so depending on your workload um it
could
potentially save you a fair amount of
money
from some folks i have heard the
opposite
it really depends on your workload and
your use case but
my little tiny startup experience
it’s been serverless has been really
great in terms of cost
if anything the thing that has cost us
the most
has been
the non-serverless services so things
like
rds relational database services it’s
always up and running um elasticsearch
always up and running but yeah all the
serverless stuff has been super cheap
and even considering that each dev
has their own cloud environment like
it’s
from personal experience it has been
cheaper but i
my experience might not be yours so
um from what i’ve seen i
agree with that the servers
um are the most expensive part
um
but because i
in my experience being able to
come out with somewhat of a hybrid model
where i
able to
run
a kubernetes cluster on say spot
instances like i mean i can run a
control plane on
something that cost me less than a penny
an hour and have high availability for a
control plane come out actually cheaper
than i would doing eks or something like
that
um
and then have anything like
for logging servers
um say have a grafana or influx
and i’m
already exporting logs to there i can
have
serverless functions run as containers
across the infrastructure and
if i have to scale out i mean it’s going
to be
a larger up time than
if
i was just submitting to aws lambda
like a startup a cold start time if i
had to boot up a new instance but once
that scales out
it’s
the same
startup time essentially but
a lot of the costs i’ve run into
in
cloud providers like aws is honestly
it’s the
not necessarily the compute costs but
it’s the
bandwidth and data that is the most
expensive part is moving that data
around in the cloud
for us anyway
perfect that’s really insightful thanks
so much jessica um and then while we’re
here um you know another big
consideration for serverless that uh
we’ve run into quite a bit is you know
what does security look like how do we
keep a security mindset um
while working within the serverless
model um jessica do you have any um
insight into that specifically
sure um
what we have done um i mean we’re
still building things from the ground up
but uh the first thing we did um
was create an odc workflow with key
cloak
and kong to lock down our apis and
implement
um
authorization
and
resource management of the api through
key cloak or something like that and
it’s
honestly
the
effort to
start something like that is so low that
it’s
not doing it is silly
it is
very i don’t want to say it’s very
straightforward
and
i mean past locking
that down um
with
pass locking your api down or your
application down with
oauth
another benefit is you’re really only
having ingress to your cloud on one port
with tls
um
which i think is really
beneficial i mean
in my use case that’s what i’m doing
there are obviously there’s you know
there’s depends on your use case but
for something like an api it’s
nice having
everything i mean the great part about
security and serverless is you don’t
worry about it when you’re developing
you offload all that onto the front end
and that’s the beautiful part really
speeds up the development process and
frees up the developer from worrying
about application security other than
their own code
perfect um any other considerations from
schaller danielle
well um security
is is from the design point of view and
from running even though a lot of the
running uh security is taken care of by
the infrastructure we still have uh to
keep in mind that we need to define the
policies at the end of the day so
pay attention to that
follow the best practices
read the
the different recommendations from the
cloud providers
so
but that happens in any system
and
it has had
sad news if you are not worried about
that so
it’s inherent to what you’re exposing
it’s inherit how the your services
communicate between them it’s inherited
to how you configure your infrastructure
but do we face something new no i don’t
think so there is no new monsters under
the vet
that sounds great i know that security
was something that our community wanted
to know a bit more about so really
appreciate us all going into more detail
um and another kind of part of our
community we have um so many people in
we’re folks in women in devops who are
um very interested in testing
um we have a really large qa community
so uh one of the challenges that we’ve
identified with serverless is running
serverless or testing serverless
applications so um danielle i know
you’ve come across a few kind of
anecdotes within your space of of what
this looks like but maybe you can go
into a bit more detail around what the
challenges look like um and any
potential mitigation
yeah i feel like probably the biggest
challenges
um
as someone who’s come from more of a dev
background less ops
whenever i first started with serverless
i thought
this is cool
how can i run
all this on my laptop locally
i
always ask that um
there are some answers out there now
but there’s also some debate between
you know if you should try to emulate a
cloud provider like aws on your computer
if that is the best practice or if the
best practice is to
you know just have your own sandbox
cloud account that you use um so i’m not
going to say one is right and one is
wrong but there’s definitely pros and
cons to both um i know for
local emulation it seems like local
stack is pretty big i’ve kind of used
that on and off mostly for like dynamodb
locally things like that
um
at a company that i used to work at
stackery
we had
we just made it up it was like a
marketing term um
cloud local
so essentially the idea is
if you have this was all aws so i’ll use
aws terms
if you had a lambda function that was
talking to other external services um
there are
tools that you can use
where you can emulate the lambda
function locally on your computer under
the hood under the tools it’s actually
running a docker container
and if it’s talking to like a queue or
something like that it’s talking to your
deployed so it’s like a cloud local
kind of hybrid
way of testing for your inner dev loop
and personally that has helped me out a
lot
but
as you move away from you know using
less functions and more into the managed
services that’s where that can get kind
of challenging
um but yeah i feel like in terms of
automated testing i know a lot of folks
that’s going to
rely more on
the
unit testing so just like mocking local
services um
and we do have a few end-to-end tests at
my current company and how we do that is
it’s a typescript javascript shop um
there’s like an end-to-end test runner
called cypress uh that we used you can
use like headless
um
things and spin up you spin up in a
femoral environment then you run your
tests across it
so it’s a different way of thinking um
not fully
exactly fleshed out yet but it’s always
interesting to talk to different people
because every time i talk to someone uh
everyone has a different view on it and
i
i personally learned something new so
nice anything else to add on that topic
before we move on
i think we’re good then that was a
really great overview and and um
practical
practical case as well so thank you
danielle um so what we’re going to do
now since we’re coming towards the end
of our questions um we are going to put
a poll up for everyone um to answer now
that we’ve talked about um you know the
benefits of serverless uh the costs um
the considerations around implementation
um feel free to fill out the poll and
um give your opinion on both of these
questions here we’ll discuss that at the
end
um
but our last question
here of course and we’ve talked a lot
about this already through the questions
but this is a good way to kind of wrap
up and and give our final thoughts here
is um for each of the panelists how has
the serverless model
impacted your day-to-day as a developer
feel free to take that as broad or as
narrow as possible
maybe we can start with jessica sure
i’ve always been more on the op side but
i’ve
i’ve done some
in the past i’ve done some local
development
um for
just
my own
things to help me day-to-day in ops um
and then i’ve started
more recently um
developing typescript or
developing
you know typescript uh serverless api um
and
it’s really just
forced me to think more abstractly it is
more
complex in the sense not necessarily
anything that anything is more
difficult
there’s just more components or there’s
the same number of components they’re
just
no longer monolithic
um
which is
good and bad um
but i would i mean it’s
i would say it’s kind of sped up
my process a lot easier because i could
just
run i guess i could do it before either
but uh
i
mean there’s a lot of
the landscape is getting much better for
testing
locally um there’s i’ve used local stack
before that’s nice um and then
but
yeah uh
i don’t really have too much to say on
that i guess it’s i’m kind of agnostic
to it either way
it’s i mean it’s helped me think more
abstractly i would say that’s probably
the most impactful thing
thanks jessica maybe we can uh go to
danielle now
uh i think for me it’s been
it is a very technical thing but i feel
like the biggest impact for me has been
more like the human side of it um
because we had you know you have to
completely change your process when you
kind of have a more blurry
you don’t have a clean line between dev
and ops with something like serverless
um in general
and i feel like it’s helped me coming
from more of the dev side i learned more
about ops and how things work
and being able to kind of learn some of
the lingo that the smart ops people use
and also
serverless is such a new thing um that
we are all learning
and you know there’s always a new
service or something that’s released and
i feel like the the overall serverless
community has been really great um
with um learning so like people are very
accessible like i’ve dm’d you know some
you know twitter superhero people and
like they’ve always answered me and have
had time for me and the community has
been really great
wonderful thanks danielle and michelle
i’ll let you
finish this one out
well thank you thank you serena i have
two points of view one is the developer
as as i mentioned i have been working in
this for quite long so
i started with functional programming
then moved to object oriented and now
serverless it’s very close to functional
programming so there has been a shift in
how do we see our applications or uh how
do we
think about our problem and how to model
it
so in that regard it has been
interesting to see how
we’re moving into the architecture and
designing how do we see the problems how
do we actually
break it down and create our functions
or when it actually it’s better or not
so that has been
a journey in itself as a devops person
um well as i said for me it came very
very natural because i have i was a
linux person since the early beginning
so for me this kind of of way of working
it was very very natural so i was
involved since the early beginning even
if before it was called devops but
anyway
um
but again here you have um more
challenges for the developers that
didn’t have my background some of them
are like
what are you talking about excel like
why do i have to care about this are you
are you crazy before i only publish my
binary or i gave it to another team and
go deploy however you want i mean i
don’t even care
now
it’s like
oh my goodness
so there and there has been a learning
curve for
um developers like only developers but i
think it’s interesting because there is
more ownership so people are can see the
full cycle
so
we react faster we understand a little
bit uh better and when before was like i
don’t care is that your problem my
problem is this one um
it suddenly disappeared
and as danielle says there’s a lot of
challenges because if you’re working in
a company that has one two three themes
at the teams working in different
functions well it’s easy to to
um
decide the contracts it’s easy to test
but what happens if you’re working in a
large company that are thousands or
hundred that’s probably hundreds
hundreds of services
then the interaction between teams
it starts to be more interesting so now
the sign
um are
we
we go into more more
different challenges let’s put it like
that not only technical socially and in
us teams how do we collaborate how do we
test how do we develop how do we verify
that everything is
working
so it’s interesting
so server was for me it is
a great event advantage
um a different mindset that brings a lot
of interesting way of thinking at least
for me
and
for developers it’s a way to see the
entire circle or the entire cycle of
software development so
i like it
perfect thanks so much michelle um
wonderful well before we sign off we did
have a few folks uh put some questions
in the q a from our live
um
our live streams however um
a lot of the questions were you know
what are security implementations what
does infrastructure is code look like so
we did go into that in a bit of detail
and it was great that folks were kind of
anticipating the topics that we needed
really to touch on so that’s great if
anyone has um very specific questions
maybe follow-ups please feel free to
still put that in the in the chat but
maybe for now we can um we can go around
and give any like closing thoughts um
and also do a sign off talk a bit more
about um
where we can all connect with each other
and of course danielle you also
mentioned the serverless community so
how we can become a part of that and and
start engaging with that so um
you know i’ll i’ll start um everyone can
connect with me on linkedin and then
we’ve also got a women in devops slack
group um that i will put the link to
join
in the chat box very shortly um any
follow-up about the serverless
conversation um and any resources that
we talk about here or we can provide
afterwards i’ll put in that group so
everyone’s welcome to join obviously um
and then also please feel free to find
me on linkedin um and add me i’m always
open to talking about women in devops
and um also hearing about what topics
folks want to hear about in the future
um michelle was mentioning that we could
do an entire
um
an entire series on serverless and we’ve
really just done kind of a big overview
and i’m sure there’s
so much we could just dive into but
in the future any other specific topics
whether that’s around diversity in the
tech space career development or
technical trends i want to hear about
them and and we want to bring them to
you that’s what we did this month um and
it’s had some really great traction so
thanks again everyone um
danielle i’ll let you uh do a sign off
as well
cool um yeah i feel like i got pretty
involved in the serverless community
just from attending various serverless
themed conferences
a lot of times which can be a pro work
on you see a lot of
repeat speakers um so those are my
general pattern was to kind of take note
and be like this person seems smart and
nice
and i
stalked them on twitter and sent them a
dm you know if i had a very specific you
know like implementation question with
like dynamodb or something like that
um
i know in in aws world all of the
serverless developer advocates are very
very open to people asking them
questions they do i think like a weekly
twitch stream i think it’s like
serverless office hours
that’s a really great place to go
you know ask questions live they’re also
recorded so if you have to work or
something you don’t have to worry about
that um
as for me uh personally i am i just
joined the women in devops slack
channels if you have any questions
feel free to dm me
you can find me on twitter at
d-e-e-h-e-b-e-r-d-hever
you can find me on linkedin
i always like to meet new people and
hear what other people are working on
thanks so much danielle and i just um
put the
link to join our slack group there and
um i know with our community a lot of
folks are posting technical questions
and everyone it’s always so great to see
everyone reach out in the comments and
and help them work through that so
that’s definitely a really great
um
uh
kind of community engagement that we do
as well and danielle if you want to put
any helpful links to um
that twitch or uh your twitter and in
the slack group as well that would be
awesome
so folks can can access that later
um and uh
i’ll let you go next
well i i don’t i don’t want to say
almost the same as danielle so please
ask questions uh
like people in the conferences the
speakers are always
open to hear you and the communities
that i move around like mine because of
my background is basically java but that
community is amazing ruby community is
also very very nice
um so
interact with the community i
particularly support a lot open source
so that’s also a great way to
integrate with the larger community and
give back in the in the meanwhile
um
i
this is a personal request i’m also a
part of a lot of content committee
programs and different conferences
um
i always want to help new speakers to
come
and so if you want to start um speaking
at conferences for example i i
participate in java land which is one of
the largest in germany we have a track
for newcomers
and there is a lot of of
these kinds of initiatives around the
world either in user groups or
conferences
so
if you want more or little tips or
connect
let me know i’m the slack channel
and my twitter linkedin is like my name
and my last name
thankfully it’s quite unique so you can
find me
and
that’s it thank you very much sabrina
perfect no thank you and i actually i’m
talking with folks in our community
every day essentially in a lot of
what they bring up for career
development is that they want to get
into speaking um it’s a great resume
builder it’s a great way to just get
involved with the community and network
so that’s perfect and thank you so much
for opening that opportunity to everyone
and um we actually have a really large
uh following in germany as well so so
that’s perfect um led by our our
colleague antonia she was at devops days
there um just a few weeks ago i think in
in berlin um so jessica i will let you
um
do your sign off as well
sure i’m nowhere near as engaged as
michelle and danielle but uh
i am on linkedin um and i at
aggressively jessica
and i
really just love
connecting and discussing technical
topics and
really working through and discussing
any problem that’s not my own because
i’ve got
way too many of those
so i need some distraction
um
but uh
yeah this is wonderful um
i don’t really have a whole lot to add
perfect thanks so much jessica and um
thank you all three of y’all for joining
and giving your time this this morning
or evening or afternoon depending on on
where you are i know our community
really appreciates it and and really
wanted to talk about this this topic and
and get connected so hopefully we can
all keep in touch um via the slack group
via linkedin um and we will continue to
put more um resources in there to follow
up um
and thank you everyone again for joining
whether you’re joining on zoom um on our
live stream on twitter or on linkedin um
again my name’s sabrina um and looking
forward to seeing everyone at next
month’s women in devops which we will be
announcing very soon
um and then ari or lucy did we want to
follow up on the giveaway
do we have a winner
i don’t i don’t think ari’s here that’s
okay
that’s that’s all good um
we will have ari announce uh at a later
time who the winner yes perfect who the
winner is uh which is great because that
gives everyone a chance if they didn’t
get uh to sign up for that yet so thanks
again everyone um this is perfect yes
aria will send an email about that and
we will see you next time