Episode #54: Coordinating Cloud Engineers and Serverless Developers with Joe Duffy

About Joe Duffy

Joe Duffy is cofounder and CEO of Pulumi. Prior to founding Pulumi, Joe was a longtime leader in Microsoft’s Developer Division, Operating Systems Group, and Microsoft Research. Most recently, he was Director of Engineering and Technical Strategy for developer tools, where part of his responsibilities included managing groups building the C#, C++, Visual Basic, and F# languages. Joe created teams for several successful distributed programming platforms, initiated and executed on efforts to take .NET open source and cross-platform, and was instrumental in Microsoft’s company-wide open-source transformation. Joe founded Pulumi in 2018 with Eric Rudder, the former Chief Technical Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MYOGfK9PHM8

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm speaking with Joe Duffy. Hey Joe. Thanks for joining me.

Joe: Hey Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are the CEO and founder of Pulumi. Can you give the listeners a little bit about your background and tell us what Pulumi does?

Joe: Yeah, happy to. I founded Pulumi three years ago. Before that, I was an early engineer on the .NET framework at Microsoft. I was actually at Microsoft for a hearty 13 years working in and around developer tools the entire time, managing groups. I actually led the languages team before leaving, helped with the open source transformation at Microsoft, which was really cool to be a part of, and then founded Pulumi. Pulumi is a modern infrastructure as code platform that really brings everything we know and love about application development using great programming languages, great tooling, and actually brings it over to the infrastructure side of the house and really trying to help both infrastructure teams be super productive with great tools but also empower developers to use more of the cloud as part of their application architecture itself.

Jeremy: Awesome. You just mentioned there cloud engineers or the infrastructure team and then serverless developers, so I look at this and I tend to think... especially with smaller organizations... they're almost becoming one and the same. But as you get larger organizations and you start to separate that responsibility... and whether you have separate cloud teams and separate developers or different cells that do that kind of stuff, there is kind of this separation between the infrastructure dev ops people and the serverless developers. Can you explain that difference?

Joe: Yeah. And I agree. I think developers are doing more infrastructure now than they've ever done in the past and I think serverless is really forcing this issue a bit. Is a serverless function infrastructure or is it code? The line's a little blurry. But there's clear things that are still in the infrastructure domain: for example, setting up a virtual private cloud in Amazon, setting up a network, setting up a Kubernetes cluster. Even if you're going to run serverless functions within Kubernetes somebody's got to manage the cluster. Somebody's got to think about security. Somebody's got to think about monitoring. Some of that actually falls on the applications side. A lot of it falls on the infrastructure side.

I think of it as there are deep domain experts in the infrastructure space just like there are deep domain experts in the applications space. I think the magic of what we're seeing with serverless in particular is that the line is getting a little blurry. It's more of a policy decision, I like to say, than a technology decision about who does what. The infrastructure team is going to do the network because that's what they know how to do. They're experts in that. The development team probably doesn't want to become domain experts in how to set up networks. Similarly, the infrastructure team doesn't want to become domain experts in how serverless functions work, so it's better if the developers can be self-serve and really own their own destiny there. I think the tools and workflows really need to support the concept of these two disciplines working closer together going forward and I love that you used the phrase cloud engineering because that's really what I think of. It's the best of developers, the best of infrastructure engineers, really collaborating together.

Jeremy: Right. That's interesting, because I totally agree with that. Where, then, are these challenges, or what are these new challenges that you're seeing both sides face? Because as a developer, like you said, you need to get a little closer to the infrastructure. As a infrastructure person, you need to get a bit closer to the configurations that the developers are setting up. What are the challenges for the developers?

Joe: Infrastructure's hard. For developers specifically, I think no serverless function is an island. A serverless function is only interesting when it's paired with the infrastructure that triggers an event, whether that's a bucket, you want to do something every time a file gets added, or an API gateway where you're actually using serverless functions for infinite scale on the back end. It needs to be connected to infrastructure and historically what that's meant... Actually, one of the reasons we founded Pulumi was I got really excited about serverless and containers and I wanted to create a serverless application and it was great until I had to configure the infrastructure. I wrote 100 lines of JavaScript for a nice little serverless application. I'm like, "All right. I'm ready to go. What do I do next? Oh. For every 10 lines of JavaScript I have to write 100 lines of YAML." That was not pleasant.

That was one of the problems we wanted to solve, was really, "Let's just make it feel like we've got a real programming model, an application model, where we're just building serverless applications and the infrastructure is part of that." Not all of it, again, but a lot of it really should be closer to the applications. Most of the technology today doesn't have that worldview and so there's kind of a fundamental friction and mismatch.

Jeremy: Right. I think that's one of the things that you see more of now, especially with developers. They have to take the infrastructure into consideration now when they write in code. They didn't use to necessarily need to worry about that. Now it's like, "My code I know is going to interact with some other piece of infrastructure," which I think is a challenge there too. So what about the infrastructure side or the dev/ops people? Or I should say the ops people. What are the challenges that they face now that they've got people kind of meddling with their infrastructure?

Joe: It is a challenge to empower developers to manage more of the infrastructure, because there really is this... I think most technologies today and most teams today assume that there's this hard fall between the two sides of the house. As you pointed out, for smaller companies and companies who are born in the cloud, who are starting today, they have the advantage of not creating those silos, but for most teams there is a hard wall between them and for good reasons: because of these domain specializations and expertise. To your point, 10 years ago if I was just doing virtual machines I ta...