Mike Roberts on serverless architectures

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk serverless architecture with Mike Roberts, engineering leader and co-founder of Symphonia, a serverless and cloud architecture consultancy. Roberts will give two presentations—Serverless Architectures: What, Why, Why Not, and Where Next? and Designing Serverless AWS Applications—at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, October 16-19, 2017, in London.

Discussion points:

• Why Roberts calls serverless “the next evolution of cloud systems,” as individual process deployment and the resource allocation of servers are increasingly outsourced to vendors
• How serverless architectures use backend-as-a-service (BaaS) products and functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms
• The similarities and differences between a serverless architecture and microservices, and how microservices ideas can be applied to serverless
• Roberts explains that serverless is “not an all-or-nothing approach,” and that often “the best architecture for a company is going to be a hybrid architecture between serverless and non-serverless technologies.”
• Recent advances in serverless tooling, including progress in distributed system monitoring tools, such as Amazon’s X-Ray

We also get a preview of JupyterCon, August 22-25, 2017, in New York, from conference co-chair Fernando Perez. Our discussion highlights the sessions on JupyterLab, and the UC Berkeley Data Science program, an introductory-level course in which the students use Jupyter Notebooks.

Other links:

• Video of Roberts’ presentation An Introduction to Serverless at the April 2017 Software Architecture in New York
• The free eBook What Is Serverless?, by Mike Roberts and John Chapin
• The video AWS Lambda, presented by Mike Roberts and John Chapin
• Video of Roberts and Chapin’s OSCON 2017 presentation Building, Displaying and Running a Scalable and Extensible Serverless Application Using AWS
• Sam Newman’s book Building Microservices