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Scaling Up and Out

re:Invent has turned into a vast conference, dwarfing many other IT get togethers, 50,000 people expected with an unmanageable schedule spread across 5 hotels. Even if you can walk quickly, its at least 30-45 minutes walk between quite a few of the venues.

This is the first time I’m attending re:Invent so the rush of excitement of a new event is invigorating for me.

I’d love to meet up with anyone who is here so please get in touch via @julian wood

AWS seems an unstoppable machine and that’s not in any way to say it should be stopped. Its rare a single company rises so spectacularly to create a major new part of an already established industry. 10 years ago this new thing called EC2 was a curiosity, now its old hat as services like Lambda become the new compute engine.

Why I’m here

I’m coming to AWS self funded so don’t have a company/vendor agenda I need to follow, I can truly see what interests me! My plan is to first of all see what’s new. This isn’t just about announcements although those are important but more how AWS develops into a service provider specifically for enterprises. Cloud is a new way of doings things yet enterprises have been doing things in a particular way for a long time, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes it is plain old toxic heritage IT!

I’m also investigating how enterprises change themselves to do cloud properly, taking advantage of the flexibility and scalability of public cloud and also how AWS updates itself to service enterprises better. This is a complicated dance which needs a lot of back and forth fancy foot work from both sides. I’m expecting more enterprise features, plenty of compliance, governance and security as a service. The recently announcement of PrivateLink as a new way to connect your VPCs to AWS services with more control is a nod to enterprises that’s don’t want all their stuff near the internet by default. AWS is working hard to ensure enterprises can take advantage of all the clever cloud stuff they have to offer.

Secondly I’m watching the serverless space very keenly and expecting a huge focus on Lambda. I’m not being hyperbolic by stating the serverless/FaaS pattern is the future of compute. A new cloud operating model where all infrastructure is abstracted, business processes as pure code without restrictions on scale, billed per invocation giving you financial super-powers.

What could be coming?

AWS releases new features and major updates to existing ones in an unprecedented manor. Just last week, more than 30 announcements were made and that’s before re:Invent and the big picture announcements likely reserved for the show. Make sure you subscribe to the excellent Last Week in AWS mailing list by Corey Quinn

At this stage its a guessing game as to what they might be, but certainly more IoT, ML, AI and buckets of enticing delicious serverless. I’m expecting some Blockchain as a Service and likely Kubernetes as well.

Amazon is also a remarkable company in the way it is able to erm. reinvent itself. This isn’t just an AWS thing but AWS certainly helps all of the rest of Amazon be incredible agile, be able to continually experiment, use its own platform as a sensing engine, rely on real data to make decisions and cannibalise itself. Lambda has been built to cannibalise EC2.

Read more…

I was happy to be asked to present at the National UK VMUG about Serverless. I had done the closing keynote last year so pretty relieved that I was at least invited back!

The presentation was similar to the London VMUG presentation I had done in July although updated as the Serverless ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed.

Changes of note since July are the addition of the new and momentum gathering OpenFaas framework, Azure Functions now available in the wild with Azure Stack, AWS adding more Lambda functionality particularly with its announcement that traffic shifting is coming soon for canary releases and blue/green routing. Iron.io bought by Oracle and VMware shutting down Photon Platform and shifting direction to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).

AWS Re:Invent is in less that 2 week’s time so I’m sure there will be plenty more to talk about!

Here are the slides:

Presentation Summary:

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and the new and exciting OpenFaaS. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so critical to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Pivotal Container Service the new Kubernetes based container runtime from VMware as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

I was thrilled to be asked recently to join the CloudInsiders podcast to talk about Serverless. I was joined by Chan Ekanayake and we had a wide ranging discussion on what Serverless is, use cases, pros and cons and much more. It’s worth a listen if you’re trying to get your head around what its all about.

Thanks for having me.

Listen to the episode here: Serverless: Viva la revolución

The whole CloudInsiders podcast series is certainly worth subscribing to via iTunes or Stitcher.