Q&A with Xero Engineer Simon Coward and API Talent Architect Scott Patterson
Serverlessconf London is community led conference focused on serverless technologies and architectures. We are getting together to discuss how to build scalable, robust, high-performance systems using Function-as-a-Service technologies such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk and Google Cloud Functions; and Backend-as-a-Service technologies like Firebase, Auth0, and Algolia. In this series of short articles we are asking speakers to tell us about themselves and share their view of serverless technologies.
What’s your name and what do you do? Simon Coward, Lead Integration Engineer at Xero. I am building and designing integration solutions for the data and automation team.
My name is Scott Patterson and I am a Cloud Architect at API Talent — a New Zealand based AWS Consulting Partner.
In one or two sentences, what is your talk about? Simon: Together with Scott, I’ll be talking about applicable enterprise scale integration patterns when going serverless. While we have seen generally positive and quite encouraging results, we’ll also cover some of the challenges faced compared to a more traditional style of integration.
Scott: Together with Simon, I will talk about some of the challenges that come with the implementation of Serverless patterns in an enterprise context. In particular, we’ll address the mindset shift required when consolidating existing and traditional corporate security practices with new serverless security mechanisms and controls.
Why are FaaS/BaaS/serverless technologies and/or architectures interesting to you? Simon: I have a serious passion for Integration. Aggregating and connecting otherwise siloed systems and disparate datasets can add significant value and has the potential to gain new insights from it. That’s why I am really excited about moving away from large hosted server stacks and favour lightweight frameworks that enable services to hang together in a more decoupled way.
Scott: FaaS is an excellent mechanism to provide the necessary glue for some quick wins. By combining API Gateway with Lambda, you can make your private dataset available for others in the business to consume, without waiting for another team to provision heavy resources!
What do you think will happen in this space over the next 12–24 months? Simon: I think there will be a big shift from the traditional large scale hosted ESB / middleware platforms to lighter framework based integration solutions.
Scott: Currently there are major tooling and lifecycle management factors to be addressed. Several application frameworks are already doing a great job, and as we see these becoming more mature this will really drive adoption of FaaS.
What is the one killer feature/product/service/idea that you would like to see created? Simon: The ability to group various functions, events and endpoints together for deployment. It’s great to see that the latest version of the Serverless framework is heading in that direction.
Scott: Templated serverless architecture patterns — e.g. boilerplate serverless SPA
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