In new and quickly-expanding fields like serverless, long-standing experts are few and far between. I am excited to welcome Tim Wagner, the original leader of the serverless movement, to the Stackery Board of Directors.

Tim spent six years at Amazon Web Services as the General Manager of AWS Lambda, where he oversaw the team that built the success of serverless as a platform. In many ways, we have them to thank for creating the environment that supports Stackery and the serverless ecosystem. After AWS, Tim helped lead another bleeding-edge movement, driving forward blockchain innovation as the VP of Engineering at the digital currency exchange platform Coinbase.

In addition to his technical expertise, Tim carries the voice of modern, progressive cloud-ready enterprises to our board. He worked closely with the largest enterprises on the planet as they adopted and matured their cloud practices. I’m thrilled to work with Tim as Stackery empowers the next wave of cloud adoption.

More from Tim Wagner, in his own words.

I’m happy to be joining the Stackery Board of Directors. I’ve already had the chance to meet with—and even work with—some of the team, and we share a vision around the power and impact that serverless will have in the world. Here are a few things I’m most excited about.

Serverless will have a massive impact on how applications are built in the next decade—and Stackery is key to enabling those customer outcomes.

One of the foundational aspects of serverless is that it empowers people to focus on delivering value (through technology), not on the underlying complexity. This means people spend their time doing what people are great at: creating, innovating, solving hard problems, making decisions, and building something great. They don’t want or need to waste time on provisioning, securing, and operating all the underlying infrastructure required to run applications at scale. Being part of a team focused on the developer and operations experience in that movement again feels great!

Serverless should be powerful and simple.

Stackery is about making development easy - it shares the “fastest time to ‘thank you’” goal with serverless. When we started imagining Lambda, the first thing we said to ourselves was, “It has to be simple.”Stackery fundamentally gets that.

While many pioneering customers built their own tooling, the mentality of focusing on core business problems isn’t compatible with DIY infrastructure. If developer productivity is critical to business outcomes, then tooling and services that enable productivity will continue to rise in importance. For example, in preparation for my Serverless Conf talk this week, I built a WebSocket API to do NAT management. Creating the AWS CloudFormation template from scratch took me 15+ hours. That same effort took 15 minutes with Stackery. That’s 14+ hours I could have spent helping users or working on my next project.

It’s important to meet developers where they are—and remove friction from their paths forward.

Stackery assumes that engineers already have existing workflows. Instead of trying to reinvent a wheel that’s already turning, Stackery makes it spin faster and smoother. Stackery recognizes that engineers and the applications they create are unique and demand a serious toolbox that is as effective on Day 100 as it is on Day 1.

Serverless fundamentally changes the development process.

Today Stackery sits between how teams traditionally build software and how software is built on the cloud. Local development testing is a good example. Every developer on the planet is used to making a change and quickly testing it on their laptop. That well-established practice can be really hard and time-consuming in a serverless world. How do you replicate cloud environments on a laptop? Stackery tackles this problem for developers by giving them CloudLocal capabilities so they can test serverless functions rapidly and accurately regardless of the number of cloud services that a function invokes.

It’s apparent to me that Stackery keeps the software developer absolutely top-of-mind as they enable them to succeed with serverless. I look forward to working with Stackery to democratize serverless by helping companies and organizations of all sizes and skill levels successfully develop on the cloud.