Episode #14: Serverless CI/CD for the Enterprise with Forrest Brazeal

About Forrest Brazeal

Forrest Brazeal is an AWS Serverless Hero and a Senior Cloud Architect at Trek10, where he hosts the Think FaaS serverless podcast and contributes to their open source efforts. He understands the challenges faced by enterprises moving to the cloud and loves building solutions that provide maximum business value for minimal cost. Outside of his day job, he interviews the top names in cloud for his “Serverless Superheroes” series at A Cloud Guru and also creates the FaaS and Furious webcomic. He is the co-chair of ServerlessConf and regularly speaks at workshops and other events in the serverless community.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Forrest Brazeal. Hey, Forrest, Thanks for being here.

Forrest: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show.

Jeremy: So you are an AWS Serverless Hero as well as a Senior Cloud Architect at Trek10. And I think many people in the serverless community, as well as the underground technology rap scene, know who you are. But why don't you explain to listeners a little bit about your background and what Trek10 does?

Forrest: Sure thing. Well, and I think the underground tech rap community is basically just me. So that's a small pond there, but yeah, so my name is Forrest Brazil. I'm a Senior Cloud Architect at Trek10. Trek10 is an AWS advanced consulting partner. That means we work with AWS Technologies. We focus primarily on the cloud native side of things. So think serverless, IoT, basically anything you can build while using the best practices that AWS wants you to use. I spend a lot of time helping clients put things like that together. I also spend a fair amount of time being community-facing. I love to educate and advocate for serverless technologies wherever I can. That's why I do the serverless hero thing. And it's great to be here with you now.

Jeremy: Awesome. And I think I could probably talk to you about — I think I have talked to you about pretty much everything that serverless has. But I think what I want to do today is focused more on the sort of CI/CD process for enterprises. And maybe I know you've done a lot of stuff in that space, you and Jared Short have, and maybe you can start by telling us, sort of what's the difference between sort of your typical CI/CD process and one that involves serverless now?

Forrest: Sure, Ultimately, there's not necessarily that much difference. I mean, the underlying goal is the same. I've got code. I want to get it off my laptop. I want to get it into production and serving my users as safely and quickly and efficiently as I can. And that goal doesn't change because you're suddenly using different infrastructure, or less infrastructure hopefully, but I think where it gets a little bit interesting for serverless is you all of a sudden start having the cloud become part of your software development lifecycle a whole lot earlier than you may have been used to it in the past. So you don't write this code locally, and then you throw it over the wall and it gets deployed on some infrastructure that you're not thinking about. So much of your development process now actually is tied up in that configuration and figuring out permissions, thinking about latency at the cloud level, right? You're simply not getting a very realistic picture of what your application's going to look like if you're trying to mock all that and develop it locally. So we see people trying to figure out how can I get this app into the cloud tested earlier on in my lifecycle? How can I do that collaboratively? Or how can I do that without stepping on other members of my team who may be working on different features, perhaps in a shared account? That's where we try to put some best practices together that make things easier for serverless developers.

Jeremy: Right. Great. Okay. So why don't we start talking about it specifically with enterprises then. So you've worked with a lot of enterprises. I've worked with a lot of enterprises. We know that there are certainly challenges facing enterprises when moving, just to the cloud, let alone you know, just moving to serverless. But just from a CI/CD perspective, what are some of these challenges that enterprises face?

Forrest: I think any time you're in a large organization where you're contending with multiple teams, teams that have different priorities, different technology stacks that they're comfortable with, the biggest challenge you face is just that. Despite the temptation, there's really not a one-size-fits-all solution that you can impose. So we see a lot of these central cloud teams now, and a lot of times they have a cute name, like the Cumulonimbus team or something like that. You can always spot them a mile away. You see these teams come in and they say, “Well, we gotta solve the CI/CD problem.” They've been given that problem to solve and understandably, it's a problem. Right? Code is not getting into production fast enough or it is, and there's all this shadow IT happening, right? So people want to find a way to get around that. They give this task to a central IT team. They come up with some great solution that involves CodePipeline or something like that, and they put it in production, and they say, “Hey, everyone, come use this.” And they're rather shocked to discover when no one uses it. And the reason for that is, as I said, is that you've got teams that all want to do things their own way and they view the centrally imposed CI/CD standards is being just another thing that are stopping them from getting code to production quickly, which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what CI/CD is supposed to do. And so what you have happened then is the shadow IT problem just gets worse and your development teams continue to work around your central team, and you, frankly, wind up with a worse problem than he had in the first place. So when you're working with an enterprise then, the CI/CD challenge is how do you put something together that solves the centralization problems you have, the governance problems where you really do need some amount of rigor around who can deploy to production, when it can happen and what those deployments look like. And then you marry that to the also very real necessity for dev teams to be able to accomplish their work the way they want to. So that's the problem that we try to solve.

Jeremy: Yeah, and I think you get this other problem where nobody knows who owns the process, right, especially if you have certain teams working on different components, you know that throw-it-over-the-wall sort of DevOps mentality in a fast-paced serverless environment, anyways doesn't really work anymore, right?

Forrest: That's exactly right. An...