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Real-World Serverless

#79: The meaninglessness of serverless with Ben Kehoe

In this episode, I caught up with Ben Kehoe, who is an AWS Serverless Hero and one of the earliest adopters of serverless technologies.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed many topics around serverless and AI, including:

  • The natural evolution of marketing terms and the need to focus on specific functional characteristics rather than defending the term. For example, including of arguing about what "serverless" means, we should instead talk about "pay-per-use".
  • AWS should focus DX around the core service (e.g. CloudFormation) rather than trying to find client-side solutions by adding workarounds in SAM, CDK, etc.
  • These client-side answers have a higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Developers often don’t see the increased TCO they are taking on, but when things break, it’s a problem.
  • Developers put too much emphasis on author time benefits and not enough on runtime and operational time costs. They should be more thoughtful about the operational time cost.
  • The “infrastructure from code” movement is taking burdens off the developer but leaving them with the developer’s business, which is a bad thing.
  • Developers often have a hard time separating delivering business value vs. coding.
  • As an industry, a flawed narrative has emerged that developers are somehow special within an organisation and that it’s OK for them to ignore their responsibilities to security if there is friction in the process.
  • Ai has the potential to impede human growth as the current AI systems are not designed to generate new ideas and challenge the status quo. “an AI generator that is trained on modernist art would never invent post-modernism”.


Links from the episode:


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Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Episode source