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.
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.
AWS are consolidating core primitives and opening up the solution space to help customers do interesting things with them. 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. 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.
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. But you need to acknowledge that you are ahead of the curve. And have the courage to delete your custom built solution.
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 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'. There's definitely a lot of demand for more advice and guidance.
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. There's a lot less inerti
Hi folks. Welcome to the next edition of Serverless Craic with Dave Anderson, Author and Contributor at The Serverless Edge and Technical Fellow at Bazaarvoice.
Mark McCann:
Hi everyone! Mark McCann, Architect at Globalisation Partners. And Author and Contributor at The Serverless Edge.
Michael O'Reilly:
Mike O'Reilly, Architect with GP and Contributor with The Serverless Edge.
Dave Anderson:
We are post AWS re:Invent. I spent that week running around like a maniac, talking to people and seeing lots of stuff. So we thought we'd do a post:Invent. We did a
pre:
Invent. And this is our post:Invent. The conference had 60,000 attending in Las Vegas. Trying to book sessions in all eight hotels is hard, because you end up running around the place. It's a glorified networking event. But it's really interesting to hear the themes that AWS are talking about. When you hear the narrative you can see how the organisation is evolving. What is your impression of what AWS were talking about at AWS re:Invent?
Mark McCann:
Watching it from afar allows you to see which way it's moving.
Dave Anderson:
You've probably seen more than I did!
Michael O'Reilly:
Mark definitely saw more than you did.
Mark McCann:
A lot of it is about the next generation of cloud and the next iteration. It's focused on delivering value quickly by removing barriers to business adoption and enablement. There were great announcements and lots of good stuff. But the theme focused on time to value and removing impediments to value.
Dave Anderson:
One thing that's always interesting is AWS' customer focus. But at this years' AWS re:Invent there was more of a solution focus. I think a lot of the focus has been on migration, migration, migration. And let's get people moved. There is an interesting article in Silicon Angle. It's called "AWS chief Adam Selipsky hints at the next-gen cloud". The article came out on the first day of AWS re:Invent. And in the article he talks about two things. He talks about classic cloud versus next-gen cloud. And about how AWS is expanding and growing up. There's more focus on solutions. He also talks about the classic cloud for 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! The phrase we've been using is legacy cloud and modern cloud. But it struck me that what he was talking about in relation to cloud was exactly what we've
Michael O'Reilly:
It brought my thoughts back to a previous podcast we had done on the difference between traditional, been talking about in our book. One big thing we talk about is creating an environment for classic usage of cloud. And the organizational need to transition to modern. The article is an awesome write up that ties into that. And what we talk about in terms of our value
flywheel effect:
leveraging modern cloud, building momentum, business focus, and getting business value as quickly as possible. There are a lot of announcements about that. It is really positive to know that we are aligned with that. success so that you can deliver value quickly. A lot of the the announcements are about removing developer friction, or enabling developers to go faster and in a better way. With better observability, telemetry and metrics, so you can see how you are progessing.
Dave Anderson:
When you google'cloud', you see cloud things like compute and storage. Or what I call low level primitives. And AWS are market leading. If you want compute, get it from AWS. And that's been the way for cloud for the last 15 years. But next generation cloud is about business capability. It was interesting last year when Goldman Sachs brought out their Financial Services Data Cloud. Which was basically a bunch of financial services data. It's not a data lake. Rather it's a financial capability. So it's more than SAS. It's almost like a business capability. When you do Wardley mapping correctly, cloud primitives are shoved off to the right. They become commodity. And then you look for the business capability you need. And how to build on top of that? That's exactly what the value flywheel effect is. You're looking at your business strategy and deciding what you need to use versus what you need to build. You then use your technical strategy to build the right thing. And you're not stuck using something that someone else is going to expose as a SAS. I thought that was very powerful. Have a look at that article in the Silicon Angle. Adam Selipsky explains it in great detail.
Mark McCann:
It's also about the rise of Serverless. During the keynotes, containers weren't mentioned at all.
Dave Anderson:
Containers weren't mentioned once. Serverless was mentioned a few times. You can see they're moving beyond some of those terms.
Mark McCann:
Everything is moving to asynchronous. And everything is moving to eventdriven. The environment, the primitives and the building blocks are now in place to do event driven architecture properly. And in a way that teams can embrace, understand and do it in a well architected way. A lot of those things were hard to do in the past. EventBridge, EventBridge Pipes and Step Functions maturity are enabling teams to deliver event driven architectures more
Dave Anderson:
AWS are consolidating those core primitives. These are the primitives that we're good at. easily. Now we're going to open 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 more of an ecosystem. It was really cool when the CTO, Werner Vogel's spent the first, third of his talk talking about EDA, event driven architecture. He showed a funny video of running a cafe and getting a synchronous burger and fries/chips. Where the cafe ended up making one fry/chip at a time. He was talking about being in a synchronous world versus an asynchronous world. Serverless is basically turning into EDA, which we have been talking about. We attended EDA Day in London, back in September hosted by the AWS Serverless folks. So it was great to see him focus on that.
Michael O'Reilly:
When you're trying to describe what serverless or a serverless mindset is to an executive team, it's effectivley EDA.
Dave Anderson:
You see people talking about serverless, and not EDA. And you're thinking they are not getting it. It's not just implementing the function. It is thinking about the event that kicks off a piece of compute. You can describe it as EDA, but you need the tools to do it properly. When we were trying to do EDA years ago, the tool set was terrible. But now it's far better.
Mark McCann:
The functions are rapidly going away. The lambdas are also going away. It's more about direct connections and composition and orchestration directly from service to service. Step Functions really link that together. So if you're just focusing on lambda, you're missing the bigger picture.
Michael O'Reilly:
In the article, Adam Selipsky mentions Amazon's distributed computing manifesto and what it was built on. Even when you look at Amazon's scale, they are applying the same principles.
Dave Anderson:
You need to think about the fact that a distributed service could be called a trillion times. If we go back to The Value Flywheel Effect book, we have written about EDA and event storming. And how to build applications around socio technical and not just the architecture. There were a bunch of announcements at AWS re:Invent that back up what we have written in the book. Especially about developer enablement with code catalyst being key. There was 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.
Mark McCann:
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.
Michael O'Reilly:
It is frictionless developer experience. In our book, it's next best action phase of the value flywheel.
Dave Anderson:
AWS are developing an ecosystem, because they're linking to Slack and GitHub and other tools. They're not making you use AWS tools, which will boost the success rate of their endeavour.
Mark McCann:
We've been thinking and talking about Cloud IDEs. And doing your actual development in the cloud as well. There's no need for a heavyweight machine anymore with Cloud9 and other Cloud IDEs.
Dave Anderson:
Well architected was well represented at AWS
re:
Invent, which is our fourth phase: long term value. AWS are continuing to develop well architected and build it into things. And they are continuing to develop patterns and blueprints and accelerators available.
Mark McCann:
The term well architected was mentioned in all talks, in some way, shape or form. It's permeating everything that AWS are doing. I hope to continue to see more maturity in that. Ideally, examples and patterns that AWS use should be well architected examples and patterns. But there's a fine line between getting people to understand and get going quickly. And making sure Day 2 activities are taken care of. Well architected helps with that.
Dave Anderson:
There was another interesting announcment on EventBridge Pipes, which I think takes inspiration from the Unix pipe from back in the day! And there's good connections between Events and EventsBridge.
Mark McCann:
Just removing operational burden and complexity, allows you to scale without worrying too much. There's been lots of good blogs about Pipe. So we're not going to go over it here. But it's another great capability that allows you to do event driven architectures at scale without having to worry about the underlying operational aspects.
Dave Anderson:
AWS had lots about reducng operational burden and making lower level things less complicated.
Michael O'Reilly:
And even security was well represented with verified permissions. That's an interesting one to watch. It's out in pilot at the moment.
Mark McCann:
That will have a big an impact on managing fine grained permissions and doing identity authorization properly, You need to acknowledge that you are ahead of the curve. And have especially if you have a custom app. Most companies of a certain scale have their own custom built version of this. So there's probably lots of organisations looking at this. They have already custom built and have spent a lot of time and effort. And now there's an evolutionary step to embrace some of these things. the courage to delete your custom built solution.
Dave Anderson:
Deleting code is a good idea! There's a bunch of step function stuff out. I particularly like SnapStart. We know a few people who are working on that. It's the ability to drop large java applications in the 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.
Mark McCann:
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 a nail in the coffin for those old myths.
Michael O'Reilly:
It's interesting from the perspective of having large framework oriented services and leveraging those for femoral compute. It opens up an option that wasn't there a couple of weeks ago. It could be a game changer and it will be interesting to see how that unfolds this year.
Dave Anderson:
That's a really good one, if you're looking to get onto Serverless quickly. I was talking to the Architect who worked on that. He is called Mark Sailes and he's got a couple of talks on AWS Events YouTube Channel.
Mark McCann:
It's another good on ramp as it removes another one of those barriers for enterprises who haven't embraced serverless. It's another way of getting you into the serverless mindset.
Dave Anderson:
Speaking of which, I was talking to a lot of
people at AWS re:
Invent. And 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 received lots pf nice feedback about our book as well. I haven't gotten any cheeky comments yet. 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.
Mark McCann:
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
Dave Anderson:
Someone was asking me yesterday about how to progress. get started. I was telling them that eight years ago, it took a lot of hard yards. But starting now is easier, because a lot of the challenges have been resolved. If you go in fresh with the modern tool set, you can be confident that a lot of the underlying issues have been solved. You just need to focus on your business domain and your teams.
Mark McCann:
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.
Dave Anderson:
Serverless first is not scary anymore.
Michael O'Reilly:
A lot of companies have their value flywheel effect. There's lots of evidence and good examples. Our book describes it so there's never been a better time to start.
Dave Anderson:
Just to remind you that the book has been published in the UK. And published a week earlier in the States. So order now from your favourite bookseller. So that's the craic. It was great to see everyone at AWS re:Invent again! I think we're back to pre pandemic days! Have a look at our blog at TheServerlessEdge.com. Follow us on Twitter @ServerlessEdge. And subscribe to our ServerlessCraic YouTube Channel. Thanks very much and bye everybody.