Episode #49: Things I Wish I Knew Before Migrating to the Cloud with Jared Short

05/18/20 • 70 min

About Jared Short:
Jared has been building and operating serverless technologies in production at scale since 2015, and is laser focused on helping companies deliver business value with a serverless mindset. Jared is currently Senior Cloud Engineer, Developer Accelerator, at Trek10, Inc. but was formerly Head of Developer Experience and Relations at Serverless, Inc. and an early contributor to the Serverless Framework. In his current role, Jared's day-to-day is serverless all the time, as he helps people build and operate cloud native architectures.

Twitter: twitter.com/ShortJared
Email: [email protected]
Website: jaredshort.com/
3 Guiding Principles for Building New SaaS Products on AWS: trek10.com/blog/guiding-priciples-for-building-saas-on-aws
3 Big Things I Wish Someone had Told Me When I Started Using AWS: dev.to/trek10inc/3-big-things-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-when-i-started-using-aws-2d0n

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rA4eVtpFnVs

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Jared Short. Hey Jared, thanks for joining me.

Jared: Hey, pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Jeremy: So you are a Senior Cloud Engineer and Developer Accelerator at Trek10, Inc. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Trek10, Inc?

Jared: Sure. So my background, I think starts similar to a lot of people, where I dabbled in the basement on the all the Apple II, I learned how to program actually from a book from the library on that Apple II. And then throughout college... Well, high school and college kept keeping up with technology and building things and exploring and learning. And eventually that led me to kind of the cloud back in 2014 or so. I was big into Docker in the early days, in the cloud, and eventually found serverless while I was at Trek10.

So Trek10 is of course an AWS consulting partner. And as part of that, I get to help companies design and build serverless and cloud-native systems, with different kind of verticals all over the world. SaaS companies, enterprise companies, all of that kind of stuff. So that's where I'm at today. And I'm mostly focused on helping people learn and understand the cloud through our developer acceleration program. So taking all of those things that I've learned while helping people build things, and now helping people just learn what all they need to learn to build successfully in the cloud.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, well, so I've been following you for a very long time. I mean, you and I have known each other now for a while. Met up at a few conferences and so forth, and you always do great stuff. So I love the Trek10 blog, love the stuff that you've been working on. You've done a lot of stuff I know with Forrest Brazeal and some other things that have been very popular. There's a whole bunch of great stuff out there by you. So definitely search for Jared Short, serverless and go check out your stuff.

But I saw an article from you a couple of weeks ago. That was the three big things I wish I knew before I started working with AWS, or something like that. And that just struck a chord with me, because as I was reading through these things, I was like, "Oh man, this was the article I wish I had when I started working with the cloud way back in 2009." And since then, it's like exploded a thousand times over. So this is a great article and I'm going to put the link in the show notes, because I do want people to go read it. But I think it'd be awesome to just go through and talk about this article and kind of hit on some of these points.

The article is very in depth that goes deep into some of these things, but this is something that really warrants a conversation. So the first point that you made, the first learning or the thing that you wanted to that you wish you had known, was this idea that AWS is just this massive ecosystem and it's basically pretty much impossible to understand all of it.

Jared: Right. Yeah. It's a massive ecosystem that shows no signs of slowing down. It's pretty similar to the ever-expanding edge of the universe, it just keeps growing and consuming.

Jeremy: It's like, S3 was the big bang and then it just kept...

Twitter: twitter.com/ShortJared
Email: [email protected]
Website: jaredshort.com/
3 Guiding Principles for Building New SaaS Products on AWS: trek10.com/blog/guiding-priciples-for-building-saas-on-aws
3 Big Things I Wish Someone had Told Me When I Started Using AWS: dev.to/trek10inc/3-big-things-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-when-i-started-using-aws-2d0n

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rA4eVtpFnVs

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Jared Short. Hey Jared, thanks for joining me.

Jared: Hey, pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Jeremy: So you are a Senior Cloud Engineer and Developer Accelerator at Trek10, Inc. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Trek10, Inc?

Jared: Right. Yeah. It's a massive ecosystem that shows no signs of slowing down. It's pretty similar to the ever-expanding edge of the universe, it just keeps growing and consuming.

Jeremy: It's like, S3 was the big bang and then it just kept...

Previous Episode

Episode #48: Serverless Developer Culture with Linda Nichols

About Linda Nichols:
Linda Nichols is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. In addition to creating software solutions, she has a passion for community involvement and education. She is a co-founder of Norfolk.js, NodeBots Norfolk, and RevolutionConf. She also enjoys teaching local classes and workshops.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e5oFSIMuvcM

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Linda Nichols. Hey, Linda, thanks for being here.

Linda: Hello.

Jeremy: So you are a cloud native technical specialist, and a member of the global black belt team at Microsoft. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Microsoft.

Linda: Sure, sure. So first of all, I have like the most awesome title at Microsoft. And most people don't understand, but it sounds great. Especially you join a call with a customer and they're like, the global black belt is here. But, essentially, we're problem solvers. If someone has a problem, or they want to know how to build something, or they want to have a conversation about maybe like, something that's out of the norm, like, it's not your typical service that a lot of the cloud architects within Microsoft know, or it's something more in the open-source side, something that's heavier into serverless or Kubernetes, or just something that's maybe out in the community. There's a lot of open-source tools and things that we talk about, we could be just the open-source blackbelt team. And my background is development. I was thinking about this today. Like, I'm not afraid to say I'm in my early 40s. And so now, half my life has been developing.

I've had a professional job as a developer for half my life. So it's really like kind of ingrained in me being a developer, even if I'm not coding every single day now, because I'm on the phone a lot, just like chatting with people, but I still, like really enjoy kind of hacking at things and thinking about methodologies. And, that's part of what we do too on our team I mean, maybe someone calls us up and says, I just can't get this working and we help them through it. But also, maybe we just kind of talk about, like why are you doing this this way? And, what you think about this? And how about these tools? And that sort of thing.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright. So I've seen you give a number of presentations actually in a lot of the presentations that you give are around DevOps and serverless, right? And kind of how those things connect. And speaking about being in your early 40s, one of the things I love about your presentation, I'm in my early 40s, as well, I love your, like 80s and 90s References because I get all of them and it is absolutely amazing. So, but your talks usually are around DevOps and how it kind of intersects with serverless. And a lot of times about the serverless developer themselves. And I remember back at Serverlessconf, it was like serverless developers are developers or something like that and it was great talk. So I kind of want to talk to you today, though, about the culture, right? Like this culture around the serverless developer. Because, if you look at people using things like Amplify, there's this whole new thing like a full-stack serverless developer.

And then you've got some people who are kind of focused more on the, I guess, on the infrastructure side of serverless, which is maybe a bit of an oxymoron, but maybe understanding at least how some of these configurations work. So maybe you just give us a quick overview like, what is the overall culture look like for serverless developers?

Linda: Sure, sure. Well, first of all, you threw like an AWS term at me. And I was like, Amplify, which one is that? But, yeah, I mean, I think what I keep trying to kind of drill in, is it like, yeah, serverless developers are developers. And I keep saying too, serverless was made for us, right? I mean, serverless wasn't really it didn't come out and become popular because ops people were like, "No we don't really want to do our jobs." Like we hate infrastructure. No, no, they love it, they've been skeptical this whole time. They're like," Oh, so the developers are going to push to production now. Okay, have fun with that." so I mean, it's essentially for us, so we shouldn't be the ones that are distrustful, we should be the ones that are saying, okay, here's our pro...

Next Episode

Episode #50: Static First Using Serverless Front-ends with Guillermo Rauch

About Guillermo Rauch:
Guillermo Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, but before starting the company in 2015, he was CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. Guillermo is also the creator of several popular Node.js open source libraries like socket.io, mongoose and slackin. Prior to Node.js, he was a core developer of the MooTools frontend toolkit.

Twitter: twitter.com/rauchg
Vercel: vercel.com
Next.js: nextjs.org

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iRNxV9vRg6o

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm speaking with Guillermo Rauch. Hey Guillermo, thanks for joining me.

Guillermo: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are the CEO of Vercel, which was formerly ZEIT, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and what Vercel is all about.

Guillermo: I'm the CEO and co-creator of Next.js, which is the React framework for front-end development and JAMstack development. Vercel is the platform for deploying projects like Next.js and many other frameworks. Vercel focuses on making the lives of front-end developers really, really easy, allowing them to push their pages to our edge network, and have a very delightful serverless development experience.

Jeremy: That's what I want to talk to you about today. The last time, I think, we saw each other in person was back in... Was it back in Milan, I think, right? Almost two years ago at this point, maybe it was last year. I don't even remember. Quarantine has lasted so long at this point that I can't keep track of time. The last time I saw you, I was speaking about this idea where I felt like serverless was getting harder and harder and harder.

That was or it seems to be the wrong approach, right? We want serverless to become easier. This is something where, I think, this idea of maybe I think you call it front-end serverless or serverless front-end is where you're trying to go with Vercel. I'd love to just get your thoughts on that, just that complexity that we're now pushing towards the back end, and where you're trying to go with the front end.

Guillermo: I think you nailed it. I think the serverless world is big and complicated. I think when we first met, we really connected on this idea of like, "What is even the right definition of it?" We were both presenting at Milan trying to give a definition for it. It's a pretty silly game to play to try to even fight that fight. When I think about serverless, I think about wanting to give people a very good recipe for leveraging that kind of technology.

I think anything that relates to serverless or infrastructure really needs to disappear. It has to be all about letting people focus on their products, focus on their pages, focusing on the things that they're publishing to the internet. That's why front end really is the place where, I think, all the serverless action is happening, and the techniques and technologies that we're using in some ways are the original serverless because much of what we're doing today is this idea of taking pages, generating them statically and putting them at the edge, which means...

To me, the most fundamental serverless technology out there is CDN. They've been around for a long time even they predate a lot of the serverless movement. Yet, they had that critical idea that there is no management to do, that it accelerates you, obviously, because it's putting your content next to your customers. The very technology that this accelerates is the front end. I think what we're about to see is that a lot of what we've been advocating for in the serverless world is really starting to become much of a reality with front-end developers.

Jeremy: I think that actually makes a ton of sense, because whenever I was thinking of serverless, I would always think about the actual computations that were happening behind the scenes, so whether that's something where you're running a Lambda function, and it's pushing it into SQS, and you're connecting to DynamoDB, and you're doing all these different things with the data. A lot of that is still necessary, right? There's a lot of complexity that has to happen behind the scenes in order to make a full-fledged serverless application run.

But I think the funny thing is that a vast majority of the applications you see out there are just a collection of static pages. That's, I mean, with a little bit of API happening in the background, but that shi...