All Posts on enterprise serverless

AWS puts on one of the largest tech conferences on the planet—and they've mastered it. Even though 2020’s virtual re:Invent will be *very* different from the venue at the Venetian, I’m certain AWS will put on another great show. I’m also certain they will give us all a massive onslaught of new products and capabilities, customer success stories, partner updates, and more. As exciting as the news coming out of re:Invent is, it can also be daunting. There’s a lot. A real lot. But there’s no need to worry—the team at Stackery has perfected helping people quickly learn about and take advantage of the latest from AWS!

For decades organizations have struggled to balance developer speed and enterprise governance. This evergreen tension was a central theme at AWS re:Invent this week—just with updated, modern details (think containers, serverless, and even air gapped edge computing!). In this post I highlight three conversations from this week that revolve around increasing speed and business impact, and how to start to modernize traditional processes.

In this post I tease out common threads that every enterprise I work with is wading through on their serverless journeys. - Outcomes: serverless has a track record of delivering customer and business benefits. - Adoption: serverless adoption in the enterprise is a journey that scaled development success in a consistent and secure way. - Security: modern app development yields modern security best practices for enterprises.

This week touted a number of great re:Invent talks, especially around serverless best practices. But it was a section of David Richardson’s session that really grabbed me. As the VP of Serverless, of course David did a great job using customer stories and speakers from the BBC, Capital One, Coca Cola, and Discovery Golf to demonstrate the value of serverless. But it was the tail end of the presentation—where he focused on changing roles that are required as organizations evolve their cloud practices—that I outline here.

Enterprises taking advantage of modern security practices (think moving target defense, granular least privileged access/execution of services) are moving **from dedicated instances** to **serverless architectures.** Thus, they rely on modern managed services e.g., functions-as-a-service, managed databases, API gateways, pub/sub and queueing systems, etc. It’s the progress of security practices like this that caught my ear in this final week of re:Invent. In particular, Benjamin Smith's talk highlighted common security challenges and how to successfully navigate them.