More control is a good thing, right? I mean, who doesn’t want the ability to twist every knob and tweak every settings to your heart’s desire so that each minute detail of your infrastructure is artisanally handcrafted? I’ll tell you who: this guy! Why? Because I have neither the time, energy, nor expertise to even begin to understand the impact of most of those configuration changes. Not only that, but I likely don’t even have the information needed to understand which optimizations are required, let alone a way to prioritize them.
Tag: managed services
Stop Calling Everything Serverless!
I’ve been building serverless applications since AWS Lambda went GA in early 2015. I’m not saying that makes me an expert on the subject, but as I’ve watched the ecosystem mature and the community expand, I have formed some opinions around what it means exactly to be “serverless.” I often see tweets or articles that talk about serverless in a way that’s, let’s say, incompatible with my interpretation. This sometimes makes my blood boil, because I believe that “serverless” isn’t a buzzword, and that it actually stands for something important.
I’m sure that many people believe that this is just a semantic argument, but I disagree. When we refer to something as being “serverless”, there should be an agreed upon understanding of not only what that means, but also what it empowers you to do. If we continue to let marketers hijack the term, then it will become a buzzword with absolutely no discernible meaning whatsoever. In this post, we’ll look at how some leaders in the serverless space have defined it, I’ll add some of my thoughts, and then offer my own definition at the end.