Episode #80: Revolutionary Serverless at re:Invent with Ajay Nair

About Ajay Nair

Ajay Nair is the Director of Product Management at AWS. Ajay is one of the founding members of the AWS Lambda team, in his current role, drives the serverless product strategy and leads a talented team driving the product roadmap, feature delivery, and business results. Throughout his career, Ajay has focused on building and helping developers build large scale distributed systems, with deep expertise in cloud native application platforms, big data systems, and streamlining development experiences. He is also a co-author of Serverless Architectures on AWS, which teaches you how to design, secure, and manage serverless backend APIs for web and mobile applications on the AWS platform.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QMOLE2-SUjU
 

Transcript 

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

Ajay: Hey, Jeremy! Finally on the show, yay!

Jeremy: Well, I am glad you're here. So, you are the Director of Product Management for AWS Lambda at Amazon Web Services. So I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about your background, kind of how you ended up at AWS and then what does the Director of Product for AWS Lambda do?

Ajay: Okay, first, thanks for having me on the show. I've been a great follower of both your talks and blogs for a long time, so I'm excited to kind of finish what's been an interesting year by spending time with you. I’ve been at AWS now coming up n about seven years; been with the Lambda theme for pretty much the whole time. Tim Wagner and I were the founding folks for AWS Lambda way back when. I spent a whole bunch of time at Microsoft and some other software companies before that in a combination of development and program/product management roles. I ended up at AWS only just looking for an opportunity to go and build a new product or a new service in the cloud space. I’ve done a whole bunch of things with developers in big data platforms so far and they signed me on this top secret effort which they said was going to be a new way of doing compute. Here we are seven years later with me as the Director of Product Management. 

So my role as Director of Product really is to help figure out the why and the what of what we should be building and evolving Lambda for, so everything that's happened to Lambda over the last seven years is in some way my fault. So, yeah, in all seriousness I get to spend time with customers to figure out what the right thing to go and build for them is and help the team figure out, build it, and then help the marketing and sales team sell it. That's kind of what my day job is and it's been a great ride for the last seven years and here I am. 

Jeremy: That's awesome. Well, I am super excited to have you here. You know, you said it was an interesting year, that's probably an understatement, but not only an interesting year in terms of everything that's been happening, but also an interesting year for serverless as well. And we just finished, I think it was ... what? ... like week 27 of re:Invent. Oh, no, it's just week 3! But it felt like everything this year's just felt like it dragged on incredibly long. But so there were a lot of really cool things that happened with serverless this year and in your purview is more around Lambda, obviously, you're the Director of Product there, but there's so many services and things that happen at AWS that interact with it.

And I think what would be really great to do, and I want to be respectful of your time and of our listeners’ time, because I'm sure you and I could talk for the next ten hours about this stuff and then have to take a break and talk for another ten hours. But so we'll timebox this a little bit. But I do want to start with just kind of a year-in-review of the things that have happened to, you know ... with serverless with Lambda. What are some of the new capabilities, what use cases do those open up? And so let's start with re:Invent. Let's start with the big ones that happened at re:Invent. We can work, sort of work our way backwards and then hopefully you can kind of put all this stuff together. But so let's start there. Let's start with the big one. At least I think this is a huge one because it opens up a lot of, I think, capabilities for other people to get involved and that has to do with container packaging support. So what's the deal with that? 

Ajay: Yes, the idea behind this, as you said, is allowing you to bring Lambda functions packages, container images, and run them on Lambda. You know, this is an evolution of the team we have seen for a while where there's a set of people who say I like to build my code a certain way, but I want to run it the Lambda away and zip just isn't my style. And actually more specifically, I think the interesting aspect that is Lambda is enforced this sort of dynamic packaging structure, right, like where the runtime and layers are bound and execution time was doing something statically and I think something has happened since the beginning of Lambda is this evolution of more consistency across local and online development and trying to push that forward. 

And we just saw a great opportunity of saying, you know, the container ecosystem’s done a really nice job on the tooling and developer for front of this, driving consistency across the two brings the best of both worlds over there. Then we try to do some interesting bits over there too, like with the runtime interface client allows you to kind of work with Lambda’s event over execution model while using the container development model. The runtime interface emulator lets you get much more consistency on your sort of local testing than we have had in the past.

I mean, you have great Community Heroes like Michael Hart essentially powering large pieces of that, you know, we have taken some of the burden off his back too by standardizing some of those components and taking it over there. But it just to your point opens up a whole set of new use cases, right? Like if you've previously committed to the container ecosystem as a tooling in a block for you, you now have access to all the goodness that Lambda was bringing for you as well.

Jeremy: All right, and that's one of the things that I thought was sort of Interesting when I first heard about containers on Lambda, I was like, oh no, what's happening here? And I love containers. I know I sort of joke about it. Not a fan of Kubernetes, but that's for different reasons. But the idea of c...