(2016-11-23) Wardley Why The Fuss About Serverless

Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about serverless? It’s how back in Canonical in 2008, we knew we had to focus on the emerging DevOps world and to make sure everyone (or as many as possible) that were building in that space were working on Ubuntu. We exploited this change for our own benefits. As one CIO recently told me, one day everyone was talking about RedHat and the next it was all Cloud plus Ubuntu. That didn’t happen by accident.

Billing by function fundamentally changes how you do monitoring.

client gave me a specification and asked how much would it cost to build a system to do this? I replied — “How does free sound?” They were a bit shocked but then I added “However, we will have to be paid to operate the system. We can determine a measure of value or worth and I’ll get paid on that”. (outcome)

take a fee on every new lead created

However, this pales into a shadow compared to the next change. This we will call worth based development

My way of retrieving trades in my program was literally killing me with cost. I could see it, I could quickly direct investment into improving that one costly function and reduce the overall cost

I built a small trading platform in a day or so because I was able to re-use so many functions created by others.

Update: see the 2023 serverless map within (2023-01-30) Wardley Why The Fuss About Conversational Programming