The compounding returns of Serverless

In five years of building Serverless products one fact stands out to me more than any other.

When you build something, it stays built. Indefinitely.

Here’s an example function I deployed six months ago that I decided to upgrade the Node.JS runtime on as part of a review.

It’s been regularly handling a few thousand events per day and yet I haven’t heard a whisper of an error from it, the fact that I only observe errors almost making me blind to the constant workload it churns through.

Right now I see engineers who are constantly either underestimating the cost of managing a service or overestimating themselves, blind to the compounding returns of never having to manage a feature ever again.

Job done. Hands clean. Mental capacity free for the next feature.

As programmers we tend to forget that our job is to apply our brainpower to solving a problem and automating it so the problem is solved for good.

It has become accepted to spend half your day managing features that are technically already delivered, problem already supposedly solved. We constantly observe products break when the service is needed the most, under extreme heavy.

Adopting Serverless means you don’t need to accept it any longer.

As an offspring of this I believe this technology will spawn a whole new generation of companies. Talented Serverless developers with a clear product vision will be able to patiently build up a product over the course of 12–18 months. Perhaps while working a full time job.

The compounding returns of building features that stay built alongside the inherent scalability of Serverless will result in a product that will be rapidly capable of competing with established competitors.

And compounding returns are hard to fight against.

My hope is that the next few years will give rise to a new generation of companies, “companies of one” that reject the traditional startup model and scale responsibly and sustainably around the purpose and ideals they founded the company on.

That’s my hope for what is becoming a thriving Serverless community.

Me

An AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional with a passion for accelerating organisations through Cloud and DevOps best practices.

If you want to work together contact me over on brianfoody.com, on LinkedIn or Twitter for a chat.

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