About the Guest

Yan is an experienced engineer who has run production workload at scale in AWS for nearly 10 years. He has been an architect and principal engineer with a variety of industries ranging from banking, e-commerce, sports streaming to mobile gaming. He has worked extensively with AWS Lambda in production, and has been helping various UK clients adopt AWS and serverless as an independent consultant.

He is an AWS serverless Hero and a regular speaker at user groups and conferences internationally, and he is also the author of Production-Ready serverless.

Guest Links

• Yan’s blog
• Yan’s video course: Production Ready Serverless
• Find Yan on Twitter (@theburningmonk)
• Subscribe to Yan’s newsletter 
• Centralised logging for AWS Lambda

Transcript

Mike Julian: Running infrastructure at scale is hard, it's messy, it's complicated, and it has a tendency to go sideways in the middle of the night. Rather than talk about the idealized versions of things, we're going to talk about the rough edges. We're going to talk about what it's really like running infrastructure at scale. Welcome to the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm your host, Mike Julian, editor and analyst for Monitoring Weekly and author of O’Reilly's Practical Monitoring.

Mike Julian: This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks at InfluxData. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools — and that's where Influx comes in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of their products, and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with their time series database, InfluxDB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools. Telegraph for metrics collection from systems, coronagraph for visualization and capacitor for real-time streaming. All of this is available as open source, and they also have a hosted commercial version too. You can check all of this out at influxdata.com.

Mike Julian: Hi folks, I'm here with Yan Cui, an independent consultant who helps companies adopt serverless technologies. Welcome to the show, Yan.

Yan Cui: Hi Mike, it's good to be here.

Mike Julian: So tell me what do you do? You're and independent consultant helping companies with serverless. What does that mean?

Yan Cui: So I actually started using serverless quite a few years back, pretty much as soon as AWS announced it, I started playing around with it and the last couple of years I've done quite a lot of work building serverless applications and production. And I've also been really active in just writing about things I've learned along the way, so as part of that, a lot of people have been asking me questions because they saw my blog and talk about some problems that they've been struggling with, and asked me, "Hey can you come help me with this? I got some questions." So as part of the doing that, I like to help people, first of all and then just part of doing that is something that's been happening more and more often, so in the last couple months I have started to work as an independent consultant, helping companies who are looking at docking serverless or maybe moving to serverless for new projects and want to have some guidance in terms of things they should be thinking about and maybe have some architectural reviews on a regular basis. So for things like that, I've been helping with a number of companies, both in terms of workshops but also regular architectural reviews. And at the same time, I also work part-time at a company called The Zone, which is a sports streaming platform and we also use the serverless and is contained very heavily there as well.

Mike Julian: Okay, so why don't we back up like several steps. What the hell is serverless? Just to make sure that we're all talking about the same thing. What are we talking about?

Yan Cui: Yeah that's a good question, and I guess a lot of people has been asking the same question as well because now they say you see, pretty much everyone is throwing the serverless label at their product and services. And just going by popular definition out there based on what I see in the talks and blog posts, I guess in terms of my social media circle, I guess by the most popular definition, serverless is pretty much any technology where you don't pay for it when you are not using it because paying for OpTime is a very serverful way of thinking and planning, and two is, you don't have to worry about managing and patching servers because installing demons or Asians or any form of subsidiary or support software on it is again, definitely tied to having servers that you have to manage. And three, you don't have to worry about scaling and positioning because the systems just scale a number of underlying servers on demand. And by this definition, I think a lot of the traditional backend server's things out there like AWS S3 or Google BigQuery, they also qualify as the serverless as well.

Mike Julian: Okay, so Lambda is a good example of serverless, but there's also this thing of like a function as a service and they seem to be used interchangeably sometimes. What's going on there?

Yan Cui: So to me, functions as services, describes a change in terms of how we structure our applications and changing the unit of deployment and scaling to the function level that makes every application. A lot of the function and server solutions like a dual function or Lambda as you mentioned, they will also qualify as serverless, based on the definition we just talked about and generally I find that there are a lot overlap between the two concepts or paradigms between functions and service and the serverless. But I think there are some important subtleties in how they differ because you also have functions of service solutions like Kubeless or Knative that gives you the function oriented programming model and the reactive and event driven module for building applications, but then runs on your own Kubernetes cluster.

Yan Cui: So if you have to manage and run your own Kubernetes cluster, then you do have to worry about scaling, and you do have to worry about patching servers, and you do have to worry about paying for op time for those servers, even when no one is running stuff on them. So the line is blurred when you consider Kubernetes as service things like Amazon’s EKS or Google GKE where they offer Kubernetes as a service or Amazon's Fargate, which lets you run containers on Amazon's fleet of machines so you don't have to worry about positioning, and managing, and scaling servers yourself.

Yan Cui: At the end of the day, I think being serverless or having the right labels associated with your product is not important. It's all about delivering onbusinessneeds quickly, but having a well understood definition on those different ideas that we have, really helps us in terms of understanding the implicit assumptions we make when we talk about something. So now that everyone is talking about calling their services or prod...