Episode #38: From Digital to Serverless Transformation with Ben Ellerby

03/02/20 • 41 min

About Ben Ellerby

Ben is VP of Engineering for Theodo and a dedicated member of the Serverless community. He is the editor of Serverless Transformation: a blog, newsletter, and podcast which share tools, techniques, and use cases for all things Serverless. He co-organizes the Serverless User Group in London, is part of the ServerlessDays London organizing team, and regularly speaks about Serverless around the world.

At Theodo, Ben works with both new startups and global organizations to deliver digital products, training, and digital transformation with Serverless across London, Paris, and New York.

Twitter: @EllerbyBen
Blog: Serverless Transformation blog
Newsletter: Serverless Transformation Newsletter
Podcast: Serverless Transformation Podcast
Theodo: theodo.co.uk

Transcript

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

Ben: Hi, Jeremy.

Jeremy: So you are the VP of engineering at Theodo, and you were just recently named an AWS Serverless Hero, so congratulations on that. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and what Theodo does?

Ben: Ah yes. As you mentioned, I'm the VP of Engineering for Theodo. We help other companies launch digital products, be that startups, launching their initial MVPs, to large companies attempting a digital transformation. And more and more I'm helping our clients to use serverless. Be that through building their initial MVPs, but also training and upskilling their developers. So we're based in London, New York and Paris. And basically my role is to help coach our developers, and help us find the new technology areas we want to work on. And serverless has been highlighted as the main area we're trying to move towards. And many of our clients are starting to adopt serverless first architectures.

Jeremy: And what's your background?

Ben: My background, I've been at Theodo in London since we kicked off a team here about four years ago. Before that, a bit of time at IBM. And before that studying computer science.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. So you mentioned digital transformation, and we've heard this term a lot, especially over the last couple of years. And I think some people think that means sort of moving from on-prem to the cloud, or sort of modernizing things. But you've been using this term, serverless transformation more recently. And essentially, this is this idea of going, I guess your second move to the cloud. Right? So could you explain what you mean by serverless transformation?

Ben: Yeah, sure. So what you touched on was digital transformation was that initial move to the cloud, which smaller and larger companies have managed some, with varying degrees of success. I actually helped a company called Junction launch their initial product about two years ago, which is an AI service that helps large companies plan their migration to the cloud. And that was very much a lift and shift approach. But more recently, if we take the example of Junction, they've had more and more targets going to things like SaaS, and FaaS and serverless first approaches. When I talk about serverless transformation, I'm talking about startups who are launching their initial MVPs and doing that in a serverless first approach, but also larger companies who are trying to consolidate their developer resource by building serverless first architectures, rather than managing infrastructure. And more than just managing infrastructure, common application things like authentication, moving to that as a service and really leveraging everything as a service to focus their development teams on the core business value that they're adding, the distinct business logic that makes their company who they are.

Jeremy: Right. So I mean, it's more about that lift and shift approach. And I think we've talked about this on the show a number of times, that trying to just sort of move everything as is from your on-prem into cloud is a bit of a fool's errand, right? I mean you're essentially copying this local environme...

About Ben Ellerby

At Theodo, Ben works with both new startups and global organizations to deliver digital products, training, and digital transformation with Serverless across London, Paris, and New York.

Twitter: @EllerbyBen
Blog: Serverless Transformation blog
Newsletter: Serverless Transformation Newsletter
Podcast: Serverless Transformation Podcast
Theodo: theodo.co.uk

Transcript

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

Ben: Hi, Jeremy.

Jeremy: And what's your background?

Ben: My background, I've been at Theodo in London since we kicked off a team here about four years ago. Before that, a bit of time at IBM. And before that studying computer science.

Previous Episode

Episode #37: The State of Serverless Education with Dr. Peter Sbarski

About Dr. Peter Sbarski

Peter Sbarski is VP of Education & Research at A Cloud Guru and the organizer of Serverlessconf, the world’s first conference dedicated entirely to serverless architectures and technologies. His work at A Cloud Guru allows him to work with, talk and write about serverless architectures, cloud computing, and AWS. He has written a book called Serverless Architectures on AWS. Peter is always happy to talk about cloud computing and AWS, and can be found at conferences and meetups throughout the year. He helps to organize Serverless Meetups in Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, and is always keen to share his experience working on interesting and innovative cloud projects.

Peter’s passions include serverless technologies, event-driven programming, back end architecture, microservices, and orchestration of systems. Peter holds a PhD in Computer Science from Monash University, Australia.

Twitter: @sbarski
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petersbarski/
A Cloud Guru: acloud.guru

Transcript

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

Peter: Hi, Jeremy. Thank you for having me.

Jeremy: So you are the VP of education and research at A Cloud Guru. So why don't you tell the listeners a bit about yourself and what A Cloud Guru does?

Peter: Yeah. Thank you, Jeremy. So my background is in computer science. I got a PhD about 12 years ago, from Monash University in Australia. I worked as a consultant focusing on cloud projects, primarily. Then four years ago, I joined A Cloud Guru and have been with A Cloud Guru ever since. So at A Cloud Guru, we create awesome fun online education. So we help people get skilled up on AWS or Azure or GCP, or just learn cloud related technologies in a very fun and engaging and practical way as well.

We help people get certified, but also learn how do you use containers? How do you use Kubernetes? How do you go serverless? How do you do things with best practice in mind? So we focus on making sure that we produce that high quality, curated education that anyone can access.

Jeremy: That's awesome. All right, so you and I have bumped into each other, and you're all the way in Australia, and I'm over here on the East Coast of the United States. We've bumped into one another in Seattle, and at re:Invent a couple of times. Every time we get together, we are always talking about serverless education. I think last time we were together, we went maybe even way beyond serverless education. That's what I want to talk to you about today is just the state of serverless education.

And we can go a little bit deeper. But one of the things that I think is unique about serverless as opposed to maybe learning even containers, or even some of these other cloud concepts is, serverless just seems to be such a reworking or re-engineering your own mind to think about these things differently. What are you seeing in terms of maybe the challenges between training people, just on programming languages and some of these other cloud computing, concepts versus training people on serverless?

Peter: Yeah, it's a great question, Jeremy. Look, I hate to use the word paradigm, but it does feel, it is really a paradigm shift. Because serverless, it feels like, this is what cloud was supposed to be all along, right? You're not dealing with low level infrastructure concerns. You're not provisioning your servers and thinking about memory capacity, but you're thinking at a high level of abstraction, you're thinking in terms of code, you're thinking in terms of functions and services and event driven architectures. That's interesting. It's different and it requires people to really think in new ways.

Look, I think, honestly, the adoption of serverless will hang on education. If it can educate people, serverless as a concept as an idea will be successful. I think that's what we're all working towards. This is what you do nearly every day, right? You educate people on serverless. You blog, you talk, because this is the way we get people to understand.

Jeremy: Yeah, so that's actually a really good point about education, because I think there is an education gap. But before we talk about the education gap, I think from a more maybe structural standpoint, one of the thin...

Next Episode

Episode #39: Big Data and Serverless with Lynn Langit

About Lynn Langit

Lynn Langit is a Cloud Architect who codes. She's a Cloud and Big Data Architect, AWS Community Hero, Google Cloud Developer Expert, and Microsoft Azure Insider. She has a wealth of cloud training courses on Lynda.com. Lynn is currently working on Cloud-based bioinformatics projects.

Twitter: @LynnLangit
Site: LynnLangit.com
Courses: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/lynn-langit
GCP for Bioinformatics: https://github.com/lynnlangit/gcp-for-bioinformatics

Mentioned Articles:

Transcript

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

Lynn: Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Jeremy: So you refer to yourself as a coding cloud architect. You're also an author and an instructor. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what you've been up to lately?

Lynn: Sure. I run my own consulting company. I've done so for eight years now and I work on various projects on the cloud. Most recently I've been doing most of my work on GCP because that's what my customers are interested in. But I've done production work on AWS and Azure. And I've actually done some POCs now on Alibaba Cloud. So one of the characteristics of me and my team is that we work on whichever clouds best serve our customers, which makes work really fun. In terms of the work that we do it really depends on what the customer needs because I have this ability to work in multi-cloud. Sometimes it's me working with C levels or senior technical people helping them to make technology choices, so based on their particular vertical. But at other times I'll hire a team of subcontractors for a particular project and we might build a POC. We might actually build all the way to MVP for a customer.

Lynn: And then occasionally I take projects where I build all the way out. The longest one I've had over the past few years is I did a project for 14 months where we went from design all the way out to product. And I worked every single day I was embedded with the developer team. So I do everything from design to coding to testing. It's a fun life.

Jeremy: It sounds like it. Well, so listen, I have been following you for a very long time and I'm a huge fan of the work that you've done. I've watched some of your videos on LinkedIn Learning and just been following along with some of this other stuff that you've done. And really like you said, a lot of what you have done has been around big data and recently you've been getting into, or you have gotten into, big data and serverless. And that's really what I'd love to talk to you about today because I just find big data to be absolutely fascinating and just the volume of data that we are collecting nowadays is absolutely insane. It's overwhelming.

And I don't know if traditional systems or if especially smaller teams working on some of these specialty products have the capability or the resources to keep up with the amount of data that's coming in based off of sort of some of these traditional methods to do that. So we can get into all of that. And I have a feeling this discussion will go all over the place, which is awesome. But maybe we could start just by sort of level setting the audience and just explaining what big data is or I think maybe what you mean by big data.

Lynn: I can have a really simple explanation. I'll say the explanation and I'll tell you why. So the explanation is data of a size that doesn't fu...