Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Welcome to Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge with Dave Anderson, Mark McCann and Mike O'Reilly. We want to share our tools and techniques so that you can use them to communicate your Technical Strategy with your C-Suite and business owners. We want to help you to build a serverless first organisation. We will show you how to use Wardley Mapping to gain situational awareness of where your cloud applications and business are. And then how to develop your technical capability in away that builds engineering standards to set your organisation up for sustainable success.Sounds like the tools and techniques that you need - then hit the subscribe!-ABOUT- Dave, Mark and Mike are senior technical architects/leaders passionate about driving technical strategy. They have led transformation journeys, technical excellence, cloud adoption and tech strategies in many industries.Active in various technologies including ML/AI, Public Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), Engineering, Product, Cyber and UX.
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Serverless Craic Ep78 How the BBC Built a Serverless-First Architecture at Global Scale Case Study
How the BBC Built a Serverless-First Architecture: In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave, Mark, and Michael explore one of the most compelling real-world examples of serverless at scale: the BBC’s serverless-first transformation.
We break down how the BBC News engineering team delivers global, highly-spiky traffic, meets strict public-service constraints, reduces incidents, and accelerates delivery—all with a pragmatic serverless-first mindset.
Expect insights on production readiness, architectural constraints, continuous delivery, problem prevention at scale, and how the BBC evolved a massive digital estate by keeping things intentionally simple.
⏱️ Chapter Markers
00:00 – Intro
00:03 – Welcome to the episode
00:21 – BBC case study overview
02:11 – Complexity, scale and global distribution
03:42 – User experience, design systems, and history of BBC transformation
05:03 – Serverless-first and focusing on differentiating value
05:47 – Spiky traffic, transcoding and pragmatic trade-offs
06:42 – Constraints and why serverless works for the BBC
07:59 – Team size, reducing maintenance load, and continuous delivery
08:27 – Serverless-first, not serverless-only
09:05 – BBC traffic levels and operational performance
09:47 – Problem prevention, reliability and long-term value
10:02 – Improvements in BBC Media Player and user experience
10:06 – Evolution, complexity, and Gold’s Law
11:01 – Closing thoughts and what’s coming next
11:08 – Outro & Call to action
🔧 Resources & Mentions
BBC Article – Delivering BBC Online Using Serverless https://www.bbc.co.uk/articles/clynq1gyn1ro
The Serverless Edge – The Value Flywheel Effect Framework
https://theserverlessedge.com/12-key-tenets-of-the-value-flywheel-effect/
Gall's Law – Complex systems evolving from simple systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)
Adrian Cockcroft – Serverless constraints and production readiness
https://medium.com/@adrianco
AWS Serverless Best Practices
https://builder.aws.com/content/2pYmkuLReVaqZ29ew1P3Dn4iAvH/best-practices-for-serverless-technologies-in-aws
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
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