Serverless is the Abstraction We Deserve

A presentation at GOTO Chicago 2019 in in Chicago, IL, USA by Jesse Butler

Monolithic applications are an anti-pattern, especially when moving to cloud scale deployments. For years, microservices adoption has been tied to containers and more recently to Kubernetes. But moving from pure software development to learning Kubernetes and all of the amazing tools and components in that ecosystem is daunting. YAML just doesn’t make a great user interface.

While we have been building platforms on platforms, this thing called Serverless has become a real thing. Of course, it has a platform underneath, but it’s abstracted away. Serverless lowers the barrier to entry, allowing developers to seemingly leapfrog over the complexity and burden of learning containers and launching a Kubernetes practice. Developers focus more on their core business logic, and less on all of the things around it.

However, beyond the first few functions things can get complicated. Triaging issues and analyzing performance can be nigh impossible. The abstraction can become a liability. But Serverless exists to address a real problem, and it’s the abstraction we have to work with. In this session, we’ll discuss how we get past the initial adoption of Serverless to fully embracing it, taking on a “Serverless First” strategy.