The point of serverless is to focus on business value. But what exactly is serverless business value? Why is serverless becoming a strategic C level conversation? Where are we in mainstream adoption? How does each cloud provider compare? Is there life beyond serverless? Come and find out!

Description

Exec Summary

Serverless is achieving frictionless innovation by removing all the non-differentiating layers. As a result, enables laser focus on business value and for the first time brings business and IT together coherently.

Current Serverless Landscape

In the Australian landscape across the enterprise, government and startup, extremely interesting trends are emerging in the form of C level buy-in, strategies, business-led initiatives, evolving toolings and architectural patterns. Business teams are often rapidly innovating a rate that results in leading IT teams on a journey, or even at times fostering resistance from IT teams.

Serverless Cloud Providers

Major cloud providers are competing to bring higher level technology offerings, seamless developer experience, diverse integrations as well as best practices and recommended business processes. It is now possible to be serverless empowered regardless of your cloud ecosystem of choice.

Serverless Journey and Business Value

Ultimately, serverless is a journey and not an outcome in itself. A successful serverless journey requires a fundamental paradigm shift in organisational culture and operating model. And the correct paradigm shift depends on a clear understanding of the outcomes that serverless brings. Consider:

• In contrast traditional virtualisation and containerisation which exist purely to address infrastructure challenges. Serverless has shifted the focus beyond data centres to directly address business needs and value creation. By abstracting out the infrastructure completely and standardising environments.
• Whereas DevOps and Immutable Infrastructure broke down the “Wall of Confusion” between Dev vs Ops. Serverless operating models is arguably the only means to fully eliminate the “Wall of Frustration” culturally dividing Business and IT. By lowering the barrier to adopt cross-functional pizza teams and release every 2 weeks.
• Whilst typical IT strategies are focused on cost, resources and capability. FinDev and Serverless Microeconomics brings new competitive commercials models that unlock new innovative revenue streams and defensible profit margins, that directly drive enterprise strategy and corporate objectives.

Audience

This talk is targeted at both business leaders and veteran technologists alike. With the aim to bring much-needed value perspectives in addition to technical concepts. And to give examples of larger scale enterprise and government use cases. In a world where serverless is becoming the new norm, innovation is democratised and business can realistically move faster than IT can keep up, it is more important than ever to adapt and effectively take advantage of this new paradigm.

Key Takeaways

As a serverless practitioner and evangelist who has influenced multiple strategies, worked on numerous end to end engagements, across diverse Australian organisations and survived with countless battle scars. The author will provide the following key takeaways back by real case studies:

• Practical steps to a strategic serverless approach. That successfully brings Business and IT together to define, measure and deliver on deep yet elusive business value.
• Snapshot of the current Australian serverless landscape across the enterprise, government and startups: major challenges, use cases, security guardrails, reference architectures, and future trends.
• Serverless Showdown: feature comparisons and performance benchmarks across all major public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) serverless offerings.

Rationale

The reason why I chose this talk is that in 2019, as serverless gains momentum and becomes “the new norm”, so does the temptation increases to treat serverless as a cool technology buzzword and use it for the sake of using it and forget its original purpose of solving business problems.

I’m also quite dismayed that whilst the serverless community evangelise serverless bringing about business value and outcomes, most talks and articles are focused purely toolings and technical features which is only part of the challenge. Most case studies are limited to greenfield projects mostly within the startup space. There is very little insight into the greater challenges of serverless culture uplift and impacts to organisational structure.

I put together this talk in an attempt as an attempt to remind all of us, business and technologist alike that the point of serverless is not bring value first, not cool tech. The transformational concepts of People and Process still apply. And that in 2019 it is impossible to be agnostic to business problems as a serverless practitioner and wait for requirements to be thrown over the fence. I will also present a comparison across major cloud provider serverless offerings to ease analysis paralysis for decision makers.

Best Speaker

I am the best speaker for this talk because I am one of the few individuals Australia that has: - solid business acumen to pitch for C-level buy-in on serverless values, then hands-on take the entire engineering workforce on the same journey. - exposure to numerous serverless engagements across government, enterprise and startup in Australia - expertise in all 3 major cloud serverless offerings in production: AWS, Azure and Google - written a definitive benchmark on AWS Lambda and is working on a multi-cloud one due to popular request