Episode #59: Going Green with Serverless with Paul Johnston (Part 1)

About Paul Johnston

Paul Johnston is an interim CTO, CTO and strategist who has particular interests in serverless, cloud, startups and climate change. Formerly, Paul served as a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS for Serverless and CTO of multiple startups, including one of the world’s first serverless startups. Paul is also a co-founder of ServerlessDays.

Twitter: twitter.com/PaulDJohnstonMedium: medium.com/@PaulDJohnstonProject Drawdown: drawdown.org/Roundabout Labs: roundaboutlabs.com/Leading Edge Forum: leadingedgeforum.com/White Paper: The State of Data Center Energy Use in 2018IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºCBlog post: To fix Climate Change, stop being a techie and start being a human

 Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SI2-WU_0zgs

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm speaking with Paul Johnston. Hey Paul, thanks for joining me.

Paul: Thank you very much for having me.

Jeremy: So you are a consultant through Roundabout Labs and a research associate at the Leading Edge Forum. So why don't you tell the listeners a bit about your background and what you have been up to lately?

Paul: So, yeah, background's a bit confusing. It's always a little bit strange. I don't have this whole 14 years at any one big company or anything like that. I spent many years in tech, 20 years, working with various different startups from my own business, that kind of thing. Then I worked in a startup in 2015 that effectively started using AWS Lambda.

So this is where the serverless comes in. And I was one of the first companies to start using Lambda in any kind of scale in a startup as a kind of first principle. And then I went from there to using it in that startup in 20 countries. Went a bit mad, a tiny, tiny budget from AWS. And I was like, "Well, this kind of worked so I'm going to keep doing it," and started telling people. AWS took notice, gave me a job, that was quite fun. Was a senior developer advocate for serverless at AWS for a while.

And then didn't stay there all that long, but it was really enjoyable while I was there. And moved away from there to go and do some consulting, which I've done since 2018. 2018? 2018. And then from there...

Jeremy: What year is it again?

Paul: Honestly, this year has gone on for a very long time.

Jeremy: Right, right.

Paul: And since then I have done some consulting in various different projects, tech projects. But one of the things I've done is worked on working out how tech and climate work and how they intersect. And one of the projects I've been working on is a research project for the Leading Edge Forum, which if any of you know Simon Wardley, that's the organization that he works for.

And I've been working on a project to look at how climate change is going to affect business over the next 10 years from a tech angle very much, so from a data and a tech angle. And just trying to see what lessons we can learn and what things are going to be coming up in the future. So kind of many and varied, shall we say?

Jeremy: All right. Well, listen, I have been wanting to get you on the show for a very long time, because I think this whole climate change thing is hugely important. I have two young daughters. I think about their future. I think about the junk we pour onto the earth, the pollution, the amount of carbon dioxide we're creating.

And one of the things that I think really attracted me to serverless in the beginning was not just, you know, obviously not having to manage servers, which is great. But this idea that maybe by sharing tenancy on a big server and only using the compute that we needed to, I was thinking in the back of my head, I'm like, "Well, maybe that reduces the amount of energy we use."

And so I know you have dug into this tremendously, and I mean, you're an expert on this stuff. And so I'd love to go through all these things with you, just get your insights, get some thoughts on this stuff. We can talk about serverless and some details of serverless as well. I'm sure that's what the listeners want to hear, but I love this idea of going green with serverless. Because I think it's hugely important. I think it's a step in the right direction.

But maybe we could start and just, or start by saying, how does serverless technology compare to traditional technology or traditional servers when it comes to green computing?

Paul: So it's a very, very good question. It's almost impossible to answer in some ways, but it's really, really easy to answer in others. So one of the things you want to look at, first place you want to start is, well, effectively you want a definition of what serverless computing is.

Paul: So let's just kind of take function as a service is kind of the base enabling technology, shall we say, for most serverless computing. Because I think most people will kind of see serverless and they'll go, "Right. What does that mean?" And so you want to drop it down to something that is kind of tangible.

So you want to talk about function as a service really as being the base enabler, because serverless for me is about business value and getting as much as possible out of your technology in terms of applications and all of those elements.

And so I think when you talk about function as a service, what you get is you get a pay for what you use. So you know that you are using as little electricity for your application as you possibly can. And so what you're trying to do is go, "Well, I want to be as green as possible." So being as green as possible means actually reducing as much of your usage as possible.

That's essentially what we mean by being green is actually reducing and actually using as little, as close to zero, in terms of compute as we possibly can. So what does that mean? How do you do that? Well, in terms of building an application, don't build the application to start. Just don't build the application at all if you possibly can. If you can build it on the basis of lots and lots of caching or not running any servers at all, then great, do that.

If you can do it on the basis of only running compute when you absolutely have to, then great. If your application can scale down to zero and it literally can, nothing is running if nobody's using it, that again is... That's the kind of thinking that goes into being green and being serverless, which is why serverless is something that for me works really well alongside an environmental conversation. Because it's not just about what does the techno- how does the technology work?

It's actually, well, this approach allows me to say, well, it gives me business value. It gives me environmental value. And actually when you come down to it, it just works out as better common... It's more common sense when you actually try. And w...