Serverless Craic Ep39 AWS reInvent announcements

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

AWS reInvent announcements

In this episode we are talking about what we would like to see at AWS re:Invent. The AWS internal teams work towards re:Invent to make their big announcements. Sometimes they have announcements beforehand. But the big announcements will be on stage.

What would you like to see?

Serverless Services

An increase to the enhancement and evolution of service development capabilities and the ecosystem in general. So more serverless services coming online for items that aren't serverless and iterating to be more serverless. There's a bunch of things that people are almost afraid of like observability, deployment patterns and some of the frameworks. So make those a bit easier.

API Gateways

In service development, Private API gateways are interesting, but they could be more developer friendly, in terms of setting up, naming and managing. The edge around the environment needs to be tightened up. I don't think they have nailed the data options yet. We are seeing more enhancements around eventing capability like SNS filtering, SQS and X ray. These are things that make the serverless experience more rich and all encompassing.

Developer Enablement

That leads on to developer enablement. You need to think about developer enablement and time to value. Can you get a developer up and running with a productive IDE in the cloud? And can they start delivering value rapidly? We're seeing steps around Cloud IDE starting to emerge. I want to see what AWS does around their Cloud9 offering. So that you can go from idea to something deployed and running within minutes.

Well Architected

We are big advocates of the well architected framework. Over the last year, we've seen good announcements on well architected capabilities, systems and services coming online within AWS. I want to see a continued evolution of that. And more well architected thinking and characteristics baked into everything AWS are doing. All the way from developer advocates to patterns and code samples. Well architected needs to be better known.

A lot of people still don't know what well architected means. There is still work to do to get people to understand what well architected is and what it isn't. And have it present in the tools and not a separate thing that you need to go and do. It should just be there in your job. And there's a second thing. Some of the basic primitives are moving up a level to something more like a pattern.

Developer advocates are great at this with Serverless Land. It would be great to see some consistency in those higher level primitives. It's about fast feedback and dare I say the value flywheel. Can we get more feedback faster on our well architected status? Can the pipeline's tell us how well architected the chains that we made are. And can our IDE tell us how well architected we are? Stitching that together in a compelling way with fast feedback for the developers would raise the bar on what developers deliver into production.

That's effectively platform heuristics. I remember back in the IBM mainframe days, it was a mature platform. And you knew it so well, that they started to bake in heuristics. When you start to analyse your code there would be a heuristics to say this might be wrong. Here's what you need to do to fix it.

We're starting to see some of these elements emerge already with Security Hub, Reliability Hub and Fault Injection Simulator. It's about stitching those together like factory mode for workloads in your accounts. Tell me we're not well architected, and tell me how to fix it. There's probably an extension to that. As we enable developers I'm seeing good industry examples from new tools that have been launched. In other words here's a new feature and here's how it applies to your particular industry.

Sustainability

Sustainability is a topic close to our hearts. I haven't heard much about it this last while. More fine grained analysis of carbon scores would be useful when teams are designing and building their workloads. And getting faster feedback on a particular service and how much it is going to cost you in carbon.

What's the wacky stuff you would like to see?

I'd love to see work on APA management and API gateways. Factory mode for your accounts. How well architected are you would be really good. Instead of us having to do the reviews and do it manually. The gateways are due an uplift or enhancement. What about documentation? And how you consume information about services. We are seeing an explosion of services on the console. Is there going to be a cut down console just for your layer? Cost is always a big one. FinOps is a massive growth area with a lot of good tools out in the market. The only other one I can think about is Identity. It will be interesting to see if anything comes out with Cognito.

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