VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
So it is the question is just as we seem to be settling on docker kubernetes as a platform agnostic approach to building modern solutions serverless rears its head amazon in particular appears to be pushing customers towards lam lam lambdas landers which are definitely not platform agnostic should we as an industry be rejecting this approach in favor of kubernetes based approaches to serverless such as native or should we concede to amazon and once again head down the platform specific path?
It's a good question um look,
I think i think that the cloud providers know that you know plain old compute or plain old kubernetes is probably pretty much commoditized so they are going to attract you into their their cool services um and platforms and that's what they do um when i talk to even cloud native companies they say to me it's not that easy to shift multi-cloud is running different applications in different clouds pulling things out and running them across you know saying one day you know what i'm fed up with google i'm moving my entire thing to azure it's like saying i'm moving from net to java 20 years ago that was a big undertaking of work, you are by the nature of cloud and what you're going to try to achieve get hooked into the services um you're not going to completely get into land at the moment um you know you're going to have these stateful apps you're going to have databases and key value stores and things that you mean you can't run those all as functions and serverless things but you are going to be able to automate and orchestrate that as much as possible and you know goodness maybe they'll come up with schemeless databases and other things that mean you can run them all as functions in the future and maybe there will be an element of mobility on that but yep lambda is great um you know they've all got serverless um function based architectures but you know when you pick your cloud i and i'll be interested to hear ray's point of view to be honest i don't think i don't think you think i'm going to shift my entire application web front end to another cloud you know on a tuesday i think you may decide you're going to build a different application architecture in a different cloud using their services because they've got something unique that you want to leverage
All right Andrew,
yeah um yeah i think uh i think probably not my uh response to that question is again identifying which part of this is the application which part of this is is the data element so yeah landers are cool today next year there'll be something else and i think that's the important thing to remember every kind of horse has its course um but again at the end of the day they they all have to to utilize the data in some way shape or form so i think if you if we think about the the front-end technology or the application technology whether it's serverless or lambdas or k-native as somewhat ephemeral um so they come and go um i think that's probably the best way to think about that because um speaking or trying to pick a path forward in terms of a technology uh roadmap i think is almost impossible you need to get out your crystal ball ball to do that and as matt said certainly the the cloud vendors are encouraging you to go down a particular path which is which is often um services that that they manage themselves so i mean certainly my personal preference and it is a personal preference is uh to be able to main agnostic uh across clouds um and to be able to run those workloads anywhere and certainly kubernetes does that but i also can see that there is benefits to running uh things in lambdas for a particular purpose and so maybe for some more practical experience ray can give us some examples of of how he's done that
Over to you Ray,
Thank you uh i'm flattered uh that's the thing right i mean we uh we were we were sold particularly with tooling like terraform that you describe your infrastructure you describe your application and just you know with docker you describe your application and it is completely cloud agnostic and that was that was the beauty of it and while there are transitionary um serverless and and containerized um uh agnostic uh frameworks for deploying these things such as k natives as the delegate asked um there are they do seem to always be those little um gotchas and and the the libraries for example when you're deploying you're developing your serverless applications the uh very heavily skewed towards um if you're deploying it on for example lambda then you're going to be heavily biased towards employing the services that aws offer to you in in the application design unless you're very very scrupulous about ensuring no we're never going to touch your uh your redshift tooling we're going to put that push all that out to snowflake or something and so it's very challenging and you're very tempted to um then to lock into that regard i really wish that um something like terraform had a means of completely abstracting away your deployment processes but it's all it's all to do with cloud providers and that's a bit of a shame um yeah no O feel your pain but that said i mean uh grievous international works primarily with google uh cloud platform and they have first class support for for example k native deployed not just on kubernetes which is completely cloud agnostic so to speak more or less but it's it's a one-to-one parody with their managed serverless uh solution um cloud functions so more or less you can pick it up from this uh serverless delivery system and and push it over to that service delivery platform i can't actually speak to um lambda uh as to whether or not that's uh as portable um but i expect it is it's it's a protocol right it's an interface but um with a little bit of care and attention you should be able to achieve that