Serverless Ops: What do we do / This is what we do, when the server goes away

As DevOps was disruptive to operations, serverless will start a new disruption cycle. We will see more of our operational responsibilities removed again. We must understand what is coming along, how to properly understand our role’s value, and finally be able to redefine our role going forward.

With the rise of serverless architecture, many of the common day-to-day operations tasks will change dramatically, if not disappear completely. We as Operations professionals will be challenged to redefine our roles and responsibilities within the technology organization as serverless abstracts away the server and its respective OS to cloud service providers. No stranger to this scenario, we will not only be tasked with solving these engineering obstacles introduced by the new serverless paradigm, but we will also need to prove our value to the business in the face of a changing technology landscape… again.

This is a combination professional/cultural and technical talk. We’ll start by discussing the disruption that serverless presents to operations and why. While DevOps and public cloud are becoming commonplace, serverless is the beginning of a new disruption cycle. We need to understand why serverless is disruptive and learn from the lessons of the past.

The talk will continue on to discuss the value of operations work and understanding the relationship between work and value. Not all work has the same value and we need to understand this so we prioritize the best use of our time.

Finally I will walk through the current state of serverless engineering and tools, and show how and where we fit in. For our career longevity and security we need to understand how we fit.

A few areas I’ll discuss include:

• DevOps and public cloud… And how serverless is starting a new disruption cycle 10 years later.
• Understanding and determining the value of your work
• Moving up the value chain and closer to customer success metrics.
• Team reorganization to better align with business success.
• Serverless architectural decision making
• Performance management and cost containment
• Failure monitoring and service handling
• Security risk and concerns

If you’re an Operations engineer and you had all your host and OS related work removed from you, would you know what to do to stay busy and demonstrate your value to your organization?

I have variations of this talk. This is a combination professional and cultural talk, and tech talk and roughly a combination of the other two versions.

I launched ServerlessOps to explore the future of operations under serverless architecture. My goal right now is to reach as many people as I can to better understand the thoughts, wants, and concerns of operations engineers around serverless, help develop what the “different ops” role for serverless will be, and figure out how to guide operations engineers to that role.

ServerlessOps is bootstrapped and pre-revenue, so I’d like to discuss possible travel assistance. If the organizers are open to it and space permits, I’d be interested in giving a hands on class for getting your first AWS serverless project up and running.

This talk is based on the following blog post: https://www.serverlessops.io/blog/serverless-ops-what-do-we-do-when-the-server-goes-away