The Promise Of Pagerless Computing

Serverless computing is all the rage, as well it should be, but serverless is a how.

Pagerless is the why.

https://twitter.com/_siddharth_ram/status/992279542835306497

Maybe you're a developer who really enjoys being on-call, yanked out of sleep at 3:46 am to heroically deal with some kind of production crisis. Maybe you really like configuring CIDR blocks and subdomains and bastion hosts, and subscribing to security alerts, and keeping your machine images up to the latest patch levels, and paying for licenses, and etc. Maybe you actually miss buying physical hardware and installing it at the "co-lo".

If you are that kind of developer, AWS would love to hire you. You'll fit right in!

But for the rest of us, that's all undifferentiated heavy lifting. Yes, it's critically necessary, but there's nothing application-specific in any of it. We can't even use it to make our application stand out relative to other applications in terms of uptime, security, performance, etc., because these days users just expect stuff to work. The only way to stand out operationally is by screwing up.

Unless devops is a core competency, it's irresponsible not to outsource it to an army of technicians in white lab coats who specialize in this stuff.

Amazon didn't always understand this, but they learned (https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb.html): "It became obvious that developers strongly preferred simplicity to fine-grained control as they voted "with their feet" and adopted cloud-based AWS solutions, like Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB, over Dynamo. Dynamo might have been the best technology in the world at the time but it was still software you had to run yourself. And nobody wanted to learn how to do that if they didn't have to. Ultimately, developers wanted a service."

Bingo.

Instead of going "The developers aren't doing it right", Amazon went "Huh, that's weird, why are they doing that?", and learned from the answer.

Today, an individual developer can set up a cross-region multi-master HA/DR system in AWS for a couple bucks a month (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-a-multi-region-serverless-application-with-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-lambda). It would have cost millions and millions of dollars to do that 20 years ago. Many reasonably large companies couldn't have pulled it off. It's the democratization of operational excellence.

With everything managed, developers only need to be paged when their software--the part where they are the experts--goes insane.

A lazy programmer is a good programmer.

See also:

http://jimshowalter.blogspot.com/2018/06/building-aws-multi-region-serverless.html

https://read.acloud.guru/simon-wardley-is-a-big-fan-of-containers-despite-what-you-might-think-18c9f5352147