Episode #52: The Past, Present, and Future of Serverless with Tim Wagner

About Tim Wagner:

Tim Wagner is known for starting the serverless movement with the original business plan for AWS Lambda, and served as general manager for three of their central serverless offerings: Lambda, API Gateway, and the Serverless Application Repository. After AWS, Tim helped lead another bleeding-edge movement, driving forward blockchain innovation as the VP of Engineering at the digital currency exchange platform Coinbase. Tim is currently working on a new stealth startup, Vendia, with more information to come on June 26th.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/M6I0ay5R884

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats today. I'm chatting with Tim Wagner. Hey Tim. Thanks for being here.

Tim: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Jeremy: So you have a lot of history. There's a lot of stuff that we're going to get into today, but right now you are the CEO and the cofounder of Vendia. So I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about your background, your history, and then what Vendia is all about.

Tim: Sure, sure. So last few jobs here. I mean, I started what eventually became AWS Lambda at AWS. Joined there back in 2012, we launched that in 2014. And that taught me a ton, not just about how to run a business in the cloud, but also about how you build these massive horizontally scalable cloud services. Then I spent some time down here in San Francisco at Coinbase, a US-based cryptocurrency exchange. And I learned a lot about a different kind of scale, which is how you run these massively scaled ledgers that can hold really important information, for example like somebody's bank account. And then Vendia is in some sense kind of the combination of these two things.

I took everything that I've learned over the last seven years and my cofounders Shruthi Rao and I have brought that together to create a business to help companies break down some of the data silo and information exchange problems that they've got today. So we're still in stealth mode for a few more weeks, but I can tell you a couple of things about it. For one, when I sold AWS Lambda, customers were always excited about the product, but they also always had two concerns. First, it was an inherently proprietary technology specific to AWS. And then secondly, while it was this awesome solution for compute, it didn't kind of come preset for data solutions or a solution for state. And so with Vendia, we're trying to reimagine how companies can go serverless and then at the same time solve some of the biggest baddest challenges they've got around data silos and vendor lock in at the same time. By the way, speaking of serverless, Vendia's also proudly server and container free.

Jeremy: Awesome. So that's awesome first of all, and I'm excited for Vendia. I really am interested. Anything that you do is just gold. So I think that this is going to be pretty exciting and I can't wait for it to come out. But what I'd really like to do today since I have you, I mean, for all intents and purposes and I think you always say this lovingly, but you're really the father of serverless, right? I mean, Lambda is what kicked off this whole thing. And I know that there were other companies that this sort of like a fast type thing, but not anywhere near to the scale that that Lambda did. And I would love to hear that story. As a fan of serverless, as a fan of AWS Lambda, could we go back to the beginning and just maybe give me a little, some insights into how this all started?

Tim: So a little bit of the Lambda origin story, huh?

Jeremy: Yes. Please.

Tim: Yeah. So we roll back the clock. It's 2012, I get hired into AWS and it's my first day there. And my boss Alyssa Henry, who at that time is running all of storage, so S3, EBS, like the whole storage division for AWS sits me down at lunch and says, "Okay, Tim, so here's the deal. We heard from customers that they love S3. It's simple, it's easy to use. It's a different kind of way of thinking about the cloud. They love all of that, but it's just a storage solution, right? There's no way to ... Let's say you store an image, there is no way to make a thumbnail of it. You pull out a compressed file, there's no easy way to decompress it on the fly plus the other million things developers might want to do with the stuff that they're storing in here.

So they've told us this in customer advisory meetings and one on ones, see if he can do something with that. Okay. I'm busy, got to run. Good luck." So this is day one for me at AWS. This is literally my very first conversation coming out of the sort of the onboarding and signing up all the paperwork. So I'm like, "Okay, grow a business in the cloud. Make it easy and think about S3 as a kind of inspiration." And it's funny because a lot of people think that Lambda grew out of EC2 and it's obviously a natural extension of thinking about compute in the cloud, but it really came out of the S3 organization. And it was this kind of kissing cousin to the idea of making storage super simple. Back then S3 basically did PUT, GET and LIST. That was it.

And so the idea is what is the ... this is sort of the remit that we had. What is PUT, GET, LIST for compute? What does that ... What if you could just say run or what became invoke in the cloud and you could make a service like that? So we got started. We did, I think as Amazon is famous for doing, we worked back from customers. I did just dozens and dozens of calls with some of the folks who were some of the biggest and frankly some of the smallest AWS customers at the time. And we asked them, "How would you like this to work? What would you want it to do?" And we went through lots of, as anything finding product market fit, the false starts. At one point we thought maybe this is like a scripting service. It should be a scripting language. We could call it Amazon simple scripting service. And then we realized the acronym maybe didn't work the best for that.

So from domain specific imagery stuff to scripting, to finally landing on, no, really the challenge here is make compute simple. Then we realized we were onto something when we realized that the first million developers using AWS are not the ... They're not the next 10 million developers. We had to make the cloud as easy for someone who does applications and business logic as it is for someone with a PhD in distributed systems. And that's when we realized like there was some there, there. And so we got excited about that. We came up with this idea for event hookup and we were kind of off to the races.

Jeremy: Awesome. So I love that. And now obviously you mentioned product market fit, so there's no way you got this thing right on the first shot. Right. You must've had to go through a million different iterations. So what did you get right and what did you get wrong?

Tim: Yeah. It is funny like you think where's the crystal ball clear and where was it maybe a little bit muddy here? I think one of the things we got right and I say this without ego, I mean, because this was a lot of us working hard on this was the event piece of this. We realiz...