New Year, New Job, Same Serverless Mission
I took a new job as the GM of Serverless Cloud at Serverless, Inc. I'm really excited about what I'm working on there, and here's why...
Some Background
When I first discovered AWS Lambda six years ago, I became fascinated with serverless, or rather, I became fascinated with the potential of serverless. Having spent an inordinate amount of time during the first 15 years of my career racking, configuring, patching, maintaining, and (poorly) scaling servers, the notion of abstracting all of that away seemed too good to be true. I had already been using AWS for five years at that point, so even though the cloud had eliminated the need for physical hardware, all the complexity around building high-scale, highly-available, highly-distributed applications was still there. For me, serverless was the way to solve that problem. So I went all in.
ANNOUNCEMENT TIME!!! 🚀🚀🚀
— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) February 18, 2021
I'm joining the team @goserverless as the GM of Serverless Cloud, a next-generation #cloud offering we're building with the mission to make #serverless easier and more accessible to everyone! Read more here: https://t.co/zXv39rpOAT pic.twitter.com/NT7QRyLu5J
I spent the next two and a half years experimenting and building applications with serverless. Early on, I discovered the Serverless Framework, which dramatically increased my productivity and changed the way I thought about serverless application structure and organization. I began adapting existing architectural patterns and applying them to the growing list of AWS serverless components. I discovered new patterns, built new tools, and found new ways to structure architecture to circumvent limits of the technology. I eventually realized that some of these limitations were what gave serverless its super powers, and that if applications were developed using this mindset, then the possibilities were endless. This inspired me even more, and I started to share what I learned.
Since then, I've spoken at (and hosted) many serverless conferences, written numerous blog posts, created several open source projects, shared a bunch of my favorite serverless patterns, and even wrote a serverless musical. I began writing the Off-by-none newsletter to curate, circulate, and celebrate serverless voices. I started the Serverless Chats podcast as a way to capture and share knowledge from the conversations I was having with amazing people doing incredible things with serverless. Somewhere along the way, AWS recognized me as a Serverless Hero, opening up a new world of friends, community, and opportunity, for which I'm eternally grateful. And through all this, I've watched (and hopefully in some small part helped) serverless continue to grow and get better and better.
Now, after six years of building with serverless, and three years spent advocating for it, I decided it was time to take a breath, clear my head, and reevaluate how best to maximize my time to help more people realize and enjoy the benefits of serverless. Through my blog, the podcast, the newsletter, and my other efforts, I've been able to share my passion for serverless and the possibilities it creates with tens of thousands of people. This has been rewarding in and of itself, but when I get personal notes from people who have been inspired by a podcast episode, or learned something new from a blog post, or used one of my open source projects to make their life a little bit easier, it lights a fire that makes me want to do even more.
Taking things to the next level
I asked myself, how can I have a bigger impact? How do I help millions of people discover, create, and share serverless applications? How do I make serverless more accessible and enable teams to confidently and successfully adopt this thing that has dramatically changed the way we build and scale distributed applications? How do I get people to join the serverless revolution?
After a lot of thought, it finally dawned on me. Sharing knowledge is a great way to educate and inspire, but it's only the first step. Teams continue to use a mishmash of tools to stitch together cloud primitives, and as the underlying components of serverless needfully become more complex and diverse, the promise of "just writing code" now shifts to mountains of configuration and the need for cloud architecture expertise. There are plenty of teams that are perfectly capable of this, but there are also thousands of teams that are not, and in my opinion, they shouldn't need to be.
This is a real problem, and I've decided to make it my Everest.
Joining a team of serverless experts
Just like you can't climb Mount Everest without support, I can't possibly solve this problem without an incredibly talented team of serverless experts to help me. So I'm joining the team at Serverless, Inc. as the GM of Serverless Cloud to help build a secretive, next-generation cloud offering, with the mission to make serverless easier and more accessible to everyone!
You can sign up for early access at serverless.com/cloud.
I want others to feel that same joy I felt the first time I used the Serverless Framework, coupled with an amazing developer experience and all the tools teams need to be successful. I realize it's a lofty goal, but by embracing and cooperating with the rich ecosystem of SaaS and serverless vendors, there is an incredible opportunity here to grow the serverless community into something even more amazing than it already is.
It will be a challenging journey, but I believe that what we're working on is the way serverless was meant to be. And that is a journey worth taking.
What about the podcast and newsletter?
Don't worry, they're not going anywhere! The Serverless Chats podcast and the Off-by-none newsletter are way too important to me as they help keep me connected to all of you and the amazing serverless community. I have an awesome team that helps me produce these every week, and we're continuously working to make them better. And if you haven't subscribed, sign up for the Off-by-none newsletter and subscribe to the Serverless Chats podcast.