Episode #37: The State of Serverless Education with Dr. Peter Sbarski

About Dr. Peter Sbarski

Peter Sbarski is VP of Education & Research at A Cloud Guru and the organizer of Serverlessconf, the world’s first conference dedicated entirely to serverless architectures and technologies. His work at A Cloud Guru allows him to work with, talk and write about serverless architectures, cloud computing, and AWS. He has written a book called Serverless Architectures on AWS. Peter is always happy to talk about cloud computing and AWS, and can be found at conferences and meetups throughout the year. He helps to organize Serverless Meetups in Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, and is always keen to share his experience working on interesting and innovative cloud projects.

Peter’s passions include serverless technologies, event-driven programming, back end architecture, microservices, and orchestration of systems. Peter holds a PhD in Computer Science from Monash University, Australia.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Dr. Peter Sbarski. Hi, Peter. Thanks for joining me.

Peter: Hi, Jeremy. Thank you for having me.

Jeremy: So you are the VP of education and research at A Cloud Guru. So why don't you tell the listeners a bit about yourself and what A Cloud Guru does?

Peter: Yeah. Thank you, Jeremy. So my background is in computer science. I got a PhD about 12 years ago, from Monash University in Australia. I worked as a consultant focusing on cloud projects, primarily. Then four years ago, I joined A Cloud Guru and have been with A Cloud Guru ever since. So at A Cloud Guru, we create awesome fun online education. So we help people get skilled up on AWS or Azure or GCP, or just learn cloud related technologies in a very fun and engaging and practical way as well.

We help people get certified, but also learn how do you use containers? How do you use Kubernetes? How do you go serverless? How do you do things with best practice in mind? So we focus on making sure that we produce that high quality, curated education that anyone can access.

Jeremy: That's awesome. All right, so you and I have bumped into each other, and you're all the way in Australia, and I'm over here on the East Coast of the United States. We've bumped into one another in Seattle, and at re:Invent a couple of times. Every time we get together, we are always talking about serverless education. I think last time we were together, we went maybe even way beyond serverless education. That's what I want to talk to you about today is just the state of serverless education.

And we can go a little bit deeper. But one of the things that I think is unique about serverless as opposed to maybe learning even containers, or even some of these other cloud concepts is, serverless just seems to be such a reworking or re-engineering your own mind to think about these things differently. What are you seeing in terms of maybe the challenges between training people, just on programming languages and some of these other cloud computing, concepts versus training people on serverless?

Peter: Yeah, it's a great question, Jeremy. Look, I hate to use the word paradigm, but it does feel, it is really a paradigm shift. Because serverless, it feels like, this is what cloud was supposed to be all along, right? You're not dealing with low level infrastructure concerns. You're not provisioning your servers and thinking about memory capacity, but you're thinking at a high level of abstraction, you're thinking in terms of code, you're thinking in terms of functions and services and event driven architectures. That's interesting. It's different and it requires people to really think in new ways.

Look, I think, honestly, the adoption of serverless will hang on education. If it can educate people, serverless as a concept as an idea will be successful. I think that's what we're all working towards. This is what you do nearly every day, right? You educate people on serverless. You blog, you talk, because this is the way we get people to understand.

Jeremy: Yeah, so that's actually a really good point about education, because I think there is an education gap. But before we talk about the education gap, I think from a more maybe structural standpoint, one of the things that is really interesting about cloud computing in general, and I think you're right, it's hard to draw that distinction between what is serverless and what is just eventually cloud? What we understand that to be. I'm thinking that I watch people struggle, trying to figure out, "Okay, AWS just launched some new feature that has now made some of the workaround that I was using in the past has made that obsolete."

I think that you have this speed of innovation in the cloud. It's not just AWS, it's Google, it's Azure, it's Alibaba, it's Tencent. All of these cloud providers are just going through now, and releasing all of these really cool new features. So how does the average human that doesn't read 800 articles a week like I try to do, how do they stay up to date with this stuff?

Peter: It is actually very difficult. It's very hard because the pace of innovation, especially in cloud computing like you said, is incredible, right? It's so funny. We actually do a weekly show, a round up at A Cloud Guru covering everything that has happened in AWS or Azure for that week, right? And we always have material to talk about because there's always something new. So yeah, you have to have a trusted source, you have to watch a show like AWS This Week or read a round up blog or something, because it is so hard to keep up with everything.

Look for us, it's a full time job, right? You just have to stay up to date, then hopefully, we can share what we've learned and what's important with everybody else. But yeah, it's a challenge. I don't blame you if you miss a few things. It's just too quick.

Jeremy: Yeah, no, it goes beyond that too, right? If you think about saying, "Okay, well, the great now they've released Lambda destinations, or now there's the HTTP API, or there's these other little things they do." The Lambda destinations really changed probably what the best practices for dead letter queues with Lambda functions, right? Because you get more context when you use the failure path of a failure destination, I guess. So that's the other thing. Forget about just knowing what's available, knowing the right ways to use it, or the best practices or the leading practices. That's a whole nother thing you have to keep up with.

Peter: That's it. It's so funny. I remember, I was writing my book, I wrote a chapter on the API Gateway, and API Gateway came out. I remember I finished that chapter. I was so happy. Then literally two days later, I know Proxying came out. So now you could proxy request straight to Lambda. So you no longer have the right velocity templates. And I'm okay, well, let's scrap that chapter. Let's do it all over again. All right, had to start from scratch and come up with that new best practice. It happens all the time. It's hard.

Jeremy: Right.

Peter: Yeah, this is why ...