Episode #29: The Best of 2019

12/30/19 • 50 min

Serverless Chats

Please visit our EPISODES page for links to the full episodes.

Please visit our EPISODES page for links to the full episodes.

Previous Episode

Episode #28: Amplifying Serverless with Nader Dabit

About Nader Dabit:

Nader Dabit is a Developer Advocate at AWS Mobile working with projects like AWS AppSync and AWS Amplify. He is also the author of React Native in Action, & the editor of React Native Training & OpenGraphQL.

Twitter: @dabit3
Twitter: @AWSAmplify
AWS Amplify: aws.amazon.com/amplify
Blog: dev.to/dabit3
Github: github.com/dabit3

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with, Nader Dabit. Hi, Nader, thanks for joining me.

Nader: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are a Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services. Why don't you tell the listeners a bit about yourself and your background, and what you do as a Senior Developer Advocate?

Nader: Yeah, sure. Before I joined AWS, I was basically a front-end engineer, mainly a mobile engineer for the last, I guess four or five years before joining AWS. I kind of come from a traditionally front-end background, but the team that I work on is the mobile team, but we cover Amplify, we cover AppSync, we also cover Device Farm and the Amplify Console. And yeah, we have a couple of developer advocates, I'm one of them. And our role is very kind of lenient in the sense that we don't really have a traditional role as someone might think of maybe a developer evangelist or something.

I think it's really team dependent on what that role actually means. But to our manager, it's a way for us to have a lot of leeway in what we do, so we can write code. Most of the stuff we do is open source so we can contribute to the open source, we can speak, we can write docs, we can write blog posts. Whatever we feel is going to contribute the most to moving everything that we're working on forward, we're able to attack that and work with that.

Jeremy: Awesome. So, speaking of things that you're trying to move forward, you mentioned AWS Amplify. Which is this really cool project that Amazon is working on. Why don't you give the listeners a 30,000 foot overview of what exactly that is?

Nader: Sure. The Amplify was first, I guess, introduced as a client SDK for web and for React Native that basically allowed you to interact with things like API Gateway, things like AWS AppSync, Cognito, much easier I guess, than some of the old way. Before you were using probably the AWS JavaScript SDK, we just added improvements that were really meant for interacting with these services from client apps. The Client was first introduced, that started game gaining steam pretty quickly.

We then introduced the CLI at the... I think the next reinvents. I think it was actually, I'm not sure exactly when the CLI was released, but it was really after to the Client. And the CLI is something that basically allows you to create AWS resources in a similar fashion as you would do with something like CloudFormation or SAM or even something like the Serverless Framework.

But it gives just a different approach, so instead of having to maybe do it in the way that you're used to doing it, maybe writing some CloudFormation or maybe writing some templates with JSON or YMAL, you can just go to the command line and create an update categories versus kind of having to know what's on with AWS.

If you're coming to AWS as a newcomer, it makes a little more sense based on the feedback that we've gotten to use Amplify, because they can say, "Hey, I want an API," and in the background we'll spin up an API Gateway and point with some configuration around a proxy to pass the event into a Lambda and we'll also generate the Lambda. It's kind of an easy entry point for people, but it also is a very helpful way to generate a couple of things at once that kind of tie together, so the CLI is another part of it.

Then there's the Console, which is something that was introduced, that re:Invent 2018, and the Console is a hosting and CI/CD platform that allows you to just kind of connect to a get-repo, and then we do the build and we deploy to CloudFront with S3. It's a really nice way to deploy your web apps. We also have a lot of stuff that's been added over the last year to improve that. I would say that's the main focus, those three things, the Command Line Interface, the hosting platform and the client libraries.

Jeremy: The purpose though of these three tools sort of working together is to build mobile applications, or web applications using something like React N...

Next Episode

Episode #30: What to expect from serverless in 2020 with James Beswick

About James Beswick:

James Beswick is a Senior Developer Advocate for the AWS Serverless team. James works with AWS's developer customers to understand how serverless technologies can drastically change the way they think about building and running applications at massive scale with minimal administration overhead. He has previously worked as a Software Developer and Product Manager at various enterprises and startups, and has nearly a decade of experience building applications in the cloud.

Twitter: @jbesw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbeswick/
Email: [email protected]

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with James Beswick. Hey, James. Thanks for joining me.

James: Hey, Jeremy. Good to see you.

Jeremy: So you are a senior developer advocate at AWS. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you've been doing on the AWS developer advocacy team.

James: Sure, so I've been working with serverless for about three years now. So I'm really a self-confessed serverless geek. I've used it to build quite a few applications, front to back using only serverless. And then in April last year, I joined AWS in the developer advocate team, and so this is truly the best job in the world because I like talking about serverless to people, so I get to go around doing conferences, blog posts, webinars, applications, and also some other things to show people how to build things. Since then I've just been going all over the place doing these things, but it's been pretty amazing just to see what customers are building all over the place with these tools.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right, so I was talking to Chris Munns when I was out at re:Invent, and I put together a podcast there, and we were talking about all these new things that AWS was launching. And I think what happens with serverless is that it's moving so fast that things are constantly changing. There's always new things being released. What serverless is is still up for debate, right? I mean, there's still a lot of questions around that.

So I wanted to talk to you because you and I talk as much as we can because I love talking to you. You have great insights when it comes to this stuff, and I wanted to talk to you about sort of what are we going to see with serverless in 2020, right? Because this is the year now where all of these pieces are starting to come together. We've got all of these tools, all of these things we've been complaining about like RDS Proxy, and we can't do this, and we can't do that. These problems are going away at a rapid clip. Maybe you can give me your take just on, I mean, what does 2020 look like for Serverless?

James: It's a great, great question. In the last five years, you know Lambda's really five years old, what's been happening is the space has been emerging and developing so quickly, we're simply seeing customers pick up the tools and build things and then find they need more features. So we've been building all these features as quickly as possible. And I think what's different this year is that this whole space is starting to mature very rapidly. And we're seeing customers, both startups and hug enterprises using all of these tools at scale. And starting to see the same patterns emerging from their use cases.

So what we're doing for the next 12 months is essentially looking at the entire list of requests that's coming right from customers where they want certain things and dedicating those resources to building out the features they want. So AWS is famous for listening to customers and building those features, but I'd say in serverless, I mean it really is the case their entire road map is coming back from these early adopters and these users and helping us to find what we now build.

Now in terms of actual concrete things, most of that comes down to improving performance all the time, always making sure we can make performance as good as possible but also improving tools and making sure that we integrate with developer tools that they're using all the time, and just making sure that all features, we sand off any rough edges that we have. So a lot of the time with AWS features, what we're doing is we deploying them out to customers as quickly as possible so that people get the first look at what we're building. And then when we get that feedback, then we build the additional bells and whistles to make sure it's exactly what people want.

Jeremy: Yeah, no that's great. And the other thing that I, I keep hoping for this, right? ...