Episode #26: re:Inventing Serverless with Chris Munns

About Chris Munns:

Chris Munns is the Senior Manager of Developer Advocacy for Serverless Applications at Amazon Web Services based in New York City. Chris works with AWS's developer customers to understand how serverless technologies can drastically change the way they think about building and running applications at potentially massive scale with minimal administration overhead. Prior to this role, Chris was the global Business Development Manager for DevOps at AWS, spent a few years as a Solutions Architect at AWS, and has held senior operations engineering posts at Etsy, Meetup, and other NYC based startups. Chris has a Bachelor of Science in Applied Networking and System Administration from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Transcript:

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

Chris: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are the Senior Manager of Developer Advocacy for Serverless at AWS cloud. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do in that role?

Chris: For sure. Definitely. Going back to the earlier parts of my career, I started as what I guess, I would have considered a sysadmin. Maybe these days, you would call it a DevOps engineer or an SRV or something like that. I took care of servers and infrastructure, a jack of all trades across the stack below the application. Then, just a little over eight years ago, just about eight years ago, I first joined AWS solutions architect, did that for a couple years, actually went back out to a startup and then came back again. Then for the last three years, I have been a developer advocate for Serverless at AWS.

Then, just in the last year or so I've actually built out a team of people that are all over the globe. What we do as a team is we create a lot of content, we deliver a lot of content, we do a lot of interacting with our customers, trying to share the good word about Serverless and get people over the challenges and things that they are understanding the various aspects of our platform, I would say. You'll see a lot of our stuff show up in webinars, and Twitch and blog posts and in conferences, and in social media and all that stuff. I would say the next biggest part of what we do is act as a voice of the customer back to the product teams. We are embedded in the product organization, we have influence over and what product is built and to a degree, how it's built. We want to make sure that our customers, concerns, the things they're trying to solve the challenges that they have are being properly represented back to the product organization.

Jeremy: Great. All right. We are live actually in Las Vegas, we're at the Big Show, as AWS fans, I guess would call it. We're at re:Invent 2019 there have been ton of announcements so far this week and I think we're pretty much done, we've hit the max on cognitive load for the number of serverless announcements that have come out. There are a whole bunch of them that I want to talk about, and we can get into some of these in detail. There were some really great ones that I think solve a lot of customers pain points. What do you think are the biggest announcements that came out so far? Maybe not just that re:Invent, but also in the last couple of weeks? Because the last few weeks, there's been a ton of announcements as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Chris: Yeah, it's been a really hectic period for us in the serverless organization at AWS, in the last two weeks a whole bunch of things. Really, I like to boil it down to four key big things that we've launched in last couple months, announced in the last say three months that I think take on some of the biggest challenges that our customers have. The first was back in September, we announced that we were going to be changing the way that VPC networking worked for your lambda functions. We announced this new concept of what we call a VPC to VPC net, it's built on in a data based technology called Hyperplane, it's part of the advanced part of our networking stack.

As of last week, the week here before re:Invent, we got Thanksgiving here in United States, we actually finished the rollout all the public regions that we have across the globe. It's taken some time to get this rolled out. It's actually a really huge infrastructure shift, but basically what this did was it drastically lowered the overhead of having your functions attached to a VPC for cold start, we had examples where it was shaving 8, 9, 10 seconds off of that initial cold start pain. It also reduces the total number of them and so really huge one. That's the biggest one out in all public regions today globally and customers are just seeing the benefits of that.

The next is on Tuesday of this week, we announced a capability in Lambda called Provisioned Concurrency. You and I have some fun history in this that it was almost two years ago at a startup event in Boston, maybe it was? Where I talked a little bit about, some of the pre-warming hacks and then you and I just went through back and forth on it for a while you launched your-

Jeremy: Lambda Warmer.

Chris: Lambda warmer project, which has become the de facto standard. We're full circle here, you and I have this like, I don't know, two years later almost?

Jeremy: Right. It's actually funny because I wrote a blog post like an open letter to the lambda team that was asking for provision concurrency. You and I had this conversation way back when, and you said, "Well, we really don't want to do that. Because, we want to improve the cold starts and get those down." I'm actually really glad that the team at AWS did that because I think if you would have gone with provisioned concurrency before then the need to make those improvements wouldn't have been there. It pushed you and your team to and the engineers there to get those cold starts down and work on that. But now provisioned currency adds a whole new level, which again, I think is great. Do you want to talk about that now?

Chris: Yeah. We'll riff on that.

Jeremy: Okay.

Chris: I saw some commentary that people thought that this meant that we were giving up on continue to improve cold starts. It's like, we want to be really clear that, that's not the case. This is a knob or lever that you can turn that yes, it changes the way that functions are essentially, it's difficult to use the term pre warm, but effectively, they are pre baked up through the init phase of the function lifecycle. What we've done throughout the year, and I've made a couple of tweets about this in the first half of the year of places where we've shaved tens of milliseconds off of some part of the overhead of the platform, or we've lowered jitter on various aspects of it. There's a lot of that stuff that continues to happen and actually, I talked about this at Serverlessconf, New York City back in October.

I basically said one of the key benefits of Serverless is that it just keeps getting better for you. There's basically three ways that happens, one is all the stuff we do behind the scenes that you just never see. The second is the stuff that we launch, that we tell you about but it's just automatic, there's no li...