Serverless Craic Ep23 Top 8 Principles for Cloud Software Engineers

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

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Today, we decided we'd have a chat about the 8 principles or tenets for a high performance serverless first team.

1. 'Chase a business outcome or a KPI'

A team should know what business KPI they're working towards. You should be able to tap a person on the shoulder and have them tell you what they're working on. And what business impact the work they're doing is going to have. If the team says 'I don't know', then you run a Northstar workshop.

2. 'Be secure by design'

Don't do security afterwards. Bake it in from the start. It's everyone's job. It's such a difficult thing to retrofit. Use threat models and get it done early. Try to solve for what you can and what you know. Bake it into all your engineering practices. And bake it into your pipelines.

3. 'Keep a high throughput of work'

That is borrowed from the DORA metrics in the 'Accelerate' book by Nicole Forsgren. This principle looks at high throughput, which is deployment frequency and lead time. For serverless teams, it is key to make changes fast and frequent. And always be learning and driving observability. As Charity Majors says, "speed is stability". The more frequently you do something, the more you deploy to production. You're actually improving your stability.

4. 'Reliably run, high stability system'

That's the other two DORA metrics of throughput and stability. A lot of discussions with test teams, QA and software engineers drive the need for investment in world class quality and testing capabilities/practices. If you're not stable, where's the gap? What scenarios and behaviours have you not covered?

5. 'Rent or reuse with build as a final option'

How do you do that? Serverless! With Serverless and SaaS and our background you're used to going straight to the workspace. And with the FORESEE diagram, we find out what we are doing and it is coding. It's a mindset thing. It's back to knowing your business purpose. And then knowing your business KPIs. If you can achieve business outcomes without doing code you are at your most optimal.

6. 'Continuously optimise the total cost'

This is the best question to ask any team. Good teams will tell you how much their cloud costs are. But loads of teams have no idea. This is a great measure of a good team. They have a cost in mind. A good team will tell you the run cost. And a great team will tell you the total cost.

7. 'Build event driven via strong API's'

This sounds very easy. But from talking to Sam Dengler, nobody is doing this properly. We've been talking about this for 20 years. Proper integration is still a mystery to most people. It is about making sure you've got the right things in the right places. But also at the right size. And having things that are composable. It's about breaking things up into their smallest constituent parts. And change things as frequently as possible.

8. 'Build solutions that fit in their heads'.

This principle is borrowed from Dan North. In other words, don't build crazy systems that are too complicated. This has a

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