Episode #77: Serverless for Operations with Ryan Coleman

About Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman is Vice President of Engineering and Product at Stackery, a serverless platform to design, develop, and deliver modern applications. Ryan is an accomplished product manager and ex-sysadmin who spent the last decade working with enterprise operations teams in the Fortune 100 to automate global infrastructure with Puppet.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tEa2eJLwjZA

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Ryan Coleman. Hey, Ryan, thanks for joining me.

Ryan: Hey, Jeremy, good to see you. I'm looking forward to this chat all week.

Jeremy: So you are the Vice President of Engineering at Stackery so why don’t you take a minute, tell listeners a little bit about your background and what Stackery does.

Ryan: Yeah, so I'm mostly a system-man by trade. I kind of been tinkering with computers most of my life and sort of to pay for my college I started doing IT support that led to more advanced operations roles that led me to some VM automation software called Puppet which led me out here to Portland, Oregon from Pennsylvania to help Puppet grow and be a product manager of professional services and sales and I got to wear a bunch of different hats and more importantly explore enterprise operations that some of the largest organizations in the world and yeah then moved on to Stackery this year to help them with their infrastructure as code platform which focuses on AWS serverless and it’s trying to help people sort of design serverless architectures, express that in AWS SAM infrastructure as code as well as some other languages, and then just provide sort of a workflow for delivering that bringing environments to deliver different changesets over the AWS infrastructure, all that kind of stuff.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right, so there's always debate in the serverless sort of ecosystem or peripheral ecosystems to serverless that talks a lot about this idea of no ops or dramatically reducing your Ops. So I tend to believe that serverless dramatically reduces your ops because there's less things you have to worry about but I don't think that reduces the amount of operations work that can be done. And I think you bring a really interesting perspective because Stackery is a hundred percent focused on building serverless architectures, which is great, but it is for operations teams, right? It's not really for your front end developer. I mean, your front end developer can use it or a developer can use it, but it's very much so focused on the idea of bringing a cohesive operations, I guess, I don't know, sort of like Mantra to a serverless infrastructure.

And with all your experience, especially with Puppet, which again was also like, you know, automating pieces of the infrastructure and like turning ... saying to ops people, “Okay, we don’t need you to install patches anymore. We don't need you to do this because this can be automated.” I think you're going to bring a really interesting perspective. And I'd love to talk to you pretty much about operations for … you know, that serverless is really for operations right, in a sense. I don't know, maybe that makes sense, maybe that doesn't. But maybe we could start by just going deeper into your background at Puppet. Like what were you finding when you were bringing in essentially an automation software to take some of the operational load off of the operations teams?

Ryan: Yeah, that's that's wonderful. I think there's a couple ... there's like two big cultural trends there that I think are worth talking about and I joined Puppet in late 2011. So think like early configuration management movement, early DevOps movement. So everyone was kind of chasing this idea of we can automate configurations on VMs, like it’s very ops-focused, but we can automate everything about the VM provisioning configuration and maintenance process and we're going to reform how we think about these teams. I like to think about how traditional development has this sort of waterfall effect where the business is coming up with why we're doing software, why we're doing IT. Development is getting to decide, well, what are we going to do to solve this business need and operations is that tail of like, well, how do we actually get this in front of customers?

And it usually flowed in that direction and dev ops was a lot of saying well, let's kind of get together into some form of a circle but in classic IT operations, ops was always chasing everything even if they were in the circle. They still had to maintain all the infrastructure over time, they had patch cycles. they had upgrades to do so, they were never really participating in that full loop as much as the business and the developers were and so if ... I came into Puppet as a Professional Services engineer during those two big kind of cultural movements, and I got to go to both public and private trainings, and the public trainings I would be doing 30 people handed off hands-on for three days, right, eight hours a day and it's a mix of lecture and it's a mix of hands-on labs.

And these people generally were operations folks who were told by their business to come and attend. Some were leaning in and interested, others were doing it as they were told and they didn't have a whole lot of exposure to infrastructure as code. They oftentimes were learning version control systems like Git for the first time, right. They're pretty behind development trends on that and they're also really new to this concept of automation. Although the time really everybody was for VM automation. So in the public trainings we kind of had this like mix of characters and in the private trainings I was there to also deploy the software and you would get this sort of room of characters, and that was my favorite time because you had the people who were going to learn Puppet and you had the people around them: the developers, the product owners, like the other representatives of that triad.

And what I found in that was is so often people were hostile towards me, towards the company, towards this idea of automation, and we get this sort of persona who I would see at every one of these trainings, you can find the person who's just sort of back in their seat, arms crossed, really just not thrilled to talk to you and you would start to try to open them up a little bit and they would just be like,” I don't understand why we do this thing. My job is working just fine. This automation is just going to remove my job. Why should I even be here?”

And then they would hear about what Puppet does, and they would see me use it. They would go through a lab of their own and by lunchtime, they were asking questions and by the end of that first day arms weren’t crossed anymore. They're leaning ahead in their chair and they're having conversations with me at the end of the day about like, “Wait a minute. So, all this stuff that I hate about my job, this thing just cranks through it and I'm still the decision-maker about what's going on and I get to control this process through?” Like they thought this thing was just going to be some magical AI that was going to totally eliminate their roles. But in the end, I think what is kind of relevant to your question here, it's about freeing someone up to do the creative work in their job, to make decisions that help the business, that do the work that helps the human brain be its most effective, and all this r...