Serverless Craic Ep41 Serverless Espresso

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

We've been talking about AWS re:Invent over the last few episodes. But one thing that we haven't talked about is Serverless Espresso.

Serverless Espresso is a pop up coffee shop that allows you to order coffee from your phone. In the Expo Hall at the AWS Summit, they have a Barista setup. And you walk up to a QR code with a screen in the background. So you scan the QR code and enter in your email address. And up pops a menu. If you select an americano, espresso or other type of coffee, it kicks off an event driven flow. It uses an event driven service under the hood and pops up in the screen as a number. And then the Barista takes the number makes your coffee and gives it to you.

But what's happening in the background is a whole load of orchestration and choreography run events. And as they've been using it as a way to explain serverless event driven architecture. Event driven architecture can be hard for people to conceptually wrap their heads around. So making it real through ordering coffee. And showing how to tie a coffee process and an event driven coffee ordering system makes it real. It demystifies it a little bit and removes some of the thinking that event driven architecture sounds really hard. This makes it more approachable.

It stitches together a lot of stuff that we've been advocating for, in a way that makes sense. By using AWS Step Functions, EventBridge, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB and Cognito. It brings to bare a lot of great technology that we are advocating for in a way that's practical and easily consumable. And the Serverless Espresso workshop is very good for walking you through the steps about why you're doing what you're doing. And how do you do that, set up rules and set up everything. It's a great way to get hands on with event driven architectures and serverless in a practical way.

There are two myths in this space that AWS are trying to dispel. We first started talking about event driven architecture 13 years ago. We had the idea of doing something but back then it was really difficult, because we didn't have a lot of support. So we had hard problems to solve technically, because the foundations weren't there. That is the first myth of being a hard thing to do.

The second myth is that people think of serverless as just writing code and functions. It's actually more like an event driven architecture. It's events firing off activity and not a call stack. So it's a lot easier to build full event of architecture than it would have been years ago. The technical challenge is not as bad as you think it is.

What I like about Serverless Espresso is the simple interactions. You order, it goes to the barista who makes the coffee, and he gives it back to you. There's one interaction. Normally when ordering a coffee, you talk to a waiter, the waiter talks to the barista, and the barista talks to someone about milk etc. There can be six or seven people in that flow. It causes confusion. In a company, if a business process is owned by six or seven teams, even across two or three departments, it gets messy. If a single team builds for the customer directly and there's no one else, it's usually pretty clean. Because you can see everything needs to happen. It gets complicated if the business processes is split over several teams and departments.

Serverless Espresso Lab is good, because the opinions are out there and you add on your bit, which is your business process flow. It goes back to our book The Value Flywheel Effect. And the first phase of the value flywheel which is clarity of purpose. Who is the customer and what is the business flow that we're trying to build? And let's have a good debate on how we are going to do that.

When you get to the technical side, that opinion is already there. And you can focus on getting the orchestration correct. Because you know that a lot of that underlying stuff is pretty much solved apart from making it behave.

Look at the Serverless Espresso Lab on workshop.serverlesscoffee.com. Or search for Serverless Espresso. And big kudos to the AWS Serverless Developer Advocate team. They're mostly on serverlessland.com. Thanks for listening.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
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