Serverless Craic Ep20 Modern Cloud

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

This is the sixth and final piece of our Modern Cloud series.

Modern Cloud has to represent value for the different personas across the business. The customer is an obvious one. But it's good to talk about internal stakeholders. The CEO and Product personas are very interesting. I think we were happy talking about the Developer and CTO/Architect perspectives. They are our personas!

Wardley Mapping guides us towards our users and their needs. Having those conversations and distilling that down helps us with our thinking. And to articulate the benefits. What are the good approaches for 'time to value'? And to realise the potential of modern cloud ecosystems. It's been useful to talk and clarify the mental model of what the cloud is and what it can be. And what benefits teams and organisations following this path can get out of it. This has been democratised globally. If you pursue this properly, you can compete with anybody in the world.

When we started talking about the cloud we thought about building ephemeral event driven architecture. But our CEO was thinking, can you be faster and cheaper? It became a value proposition. Remembering some of those things is important! You need to keep that commercial lens as you design applications and processes. And as you build up teams.

One thing that is interesting (we've been talking about it for a long time) is the term 'serverless'. We have done a lot of work on the concept of serverless first. And I think it's a strong strategy. It's very powerful. But the serverless term itself is problematic. One of the reasons why we use the term modern cloud is because Serverless has turned into a type of religious war. When people hear the word Serverless, they think of Lambda. But it's much more than that. Lambda was the first 'go to' for ephemeral event driven or function based workloads. And it's been fantastic.

But the ecosystem has evolved with managed services becoming available. And direct integration between managed services is available. So you don't need as much glue! You don't need to worry about operational burden or code liability. You can offload that to the cloud provider and to the services.

Serverless, as a term, is probably coming to a close. It was a useful vehicle to describe what emerged. But it has gone through an evolutionary journey. Now, I think the term modern cloud supplants it. Serverless exists within the IT org. With the modern cloud, you are working with Product and Business. And you need to start talking in the language of capabilities. You need to develop a ubiquitous language about building blocks to describe getting capability into production. We know what the modern cloud has under the hood. But we have to evolve to talk in business terms.

The well architected approach helps to frame it. Is it secure and operationally excellent? Is it performing and reliable? Is it cost optimised and sustainable? Those capability conversations are supplanting the discussions on whether you are using serverless or not.

That's a paradigm shift that people don't talk about. Even from teams who are using the modern cloud approach. A term that we use in 'The Flywheel Effect' is 'long term value'. And we also talk about well architected. Because we defer ops and maintenance to the client, our solutions are more cost effective, without doing anything. And they're more secure, robust and performant. You don't hear about that massive benefit.

But another thing we have been thinking about is modern cloud versus legacy cloud. Legacy cloud is the traditional call stack in the cloud. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's going to be running hot all the time. It's really just stuff that should be in your data centre, but it's now in the cloud. It's a very interesting question. It's quite a challenging question. But a lot of people look back at their traditional stack and suddenly realise it's actually a legacy monolith in the cloud.

A lot of people think transformation ends with moving to the cloud. But transformation starts with moving! Legacy cloud is where you need to start. Then you need to measure and actually start modernising. A lot of people miss that point. There's definitely a time requirement and adjustment to moving from that mindset into an organisation that can embrace what we're talking about.

With regards to the modern cloud, there's a way to organise yourself within the cloud to allow you to operate that way. And it takes time. It's slow to begin with. But as you progress, the momentum builds. And before you know it, you're up and running. It's the flywheel effect.

People think if they're in the cloud they can stop innovating, evolving and leveraging new capabilities, But then you are left behind. Your flywheel is not turning anymore. And you're not evolving for the future.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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