Serverless Craic Ep54 AWS Serverless Developer Advocate Team

AWS Serverless Developer Advocate Team news is breaking. We discuss this and the importance of community events and fostering a culture of curiosity and collaboration in the tech industry.
We emphasise the value of attending events like ServerlessDays Belfast and looking outside one's own silo to drive enterprise transformation. We also discuss the significance of developer advocacy in promoting AWS adoption and we look at the challenges of quantifying the impact of advocacy work and the importance of learning about new technologies and driving change within companies.
Outline
Serverless development and engineering history in Belfast.
ServerlessDays Belfast provided a great opportunity for attendees to engage in meaningful conversations with both beginner and seasoned experts in the field.
Serverless technology and its impact on software development.
We emphasise the importance of applying new ideas and learning from others in the tech industry.
Jeremy Daly's keynote at the event inspires attendees with his innovative approach to serverless computing at AMP.
We praise the AWS Developer Relations team for their helpfulness and unbiased opinions.
The team has been a valuable resource for learning and validation, with their content and opinions shaping the field.
Leveraging serverless technology and its benefits in modernisation and migration efforts.
We credit the DAs with breathing life into the serverless movement and discuss how serverless technology can help modernize enterprises by leveraging existing work and tailoring it to specific contexts.
Developer advocacy and its impact on the tech industry.
We highlight the valuable insights and expertise of various serverless experts, including Julian Wood, Eric Johnson, David Boyne, Marcia Villalba, and Chris Munns.
We recommend reading the ServerlessLand site as a go-to resource for understanding serverless technology and strategies.
We discuss the impact of their developer advocacy work on AWS, highlighting the need for continued investment in Dev Rel.
We emphasise the difficulty in measuring the impact of their work but noted anecdotal evidence of significant change driven by their efforts.
Modern cloud solutions and their evolution.
We discuss the evolution of developer advocacy at AWS, highlighting the importance of feedback loops and professionalism.
And emphasise the value of connecting customers with the product team to address feature requests and shape product direction.
We discuss the evolution of cloud services, including the term "next gen" and the importance of situational awareness.
And reflect on their favorite team and thank engineers for their work, encouraging listeners to follow TheServerlessEdge.com website and channels.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge: https://theserverlessedge.com/
ServerlessDays Belfast: https://serverlessdaysbelfast.com/
AWS Serverless DA Team: https://serverlessland.com/
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect: https://theserverlessedge.com/the-value-flywheel-effect/
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge: https://twitter.com/ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn - The ServerlessEdge: https://www.linkedin.com/company/71264379/
Subscribe to our Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5LvFaitkSkg2q5MWqKLrXu

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Transcript

Dave Anderson: 0:18

Hey folks, welcome back to Serverless Craic!, We're back after a short break, and we're good to go again. So I figured we'd do something slightly different for this episode. I think we should talk about the Serverless Developer Relations or the DA team at AWS. I think it's probably a good thing to talk about and reflect on. But firstly we are just finished ServerlessDays Belfast which kept us busy. Do you have any reflections on the event.

Michael O'Reilly: 0:57

First and foremost, Dave, congratulations to you and the team that organised it. I thought it was really well organised. The Titanic theme, Titanic Hotel area and the engineering history of Belfast made for a really good atmosphere. And it was packed out. I think the big thing I took away is that there's way more adoption. And the level of the talks and interactions and experience of the people there seems to be very high. And I'm not just saying it because we were there or because it was local, or whatever. I really came away with a book of stuff. There are five or six things that I genuinely wanted to take back and look into. The quality of the speakers was very high. Really good event!

Mark McCann: 2:01

I echo all of that. And it was very slick and a great venue. But there was a great community aspect to it. Lots of people and conversations with everything from beginner all the way up there to seasoned experts, having a good and meaningful conversations. It's not just the talks but the conversations on the side and the venue helped a lot with that. Great day and really impactful. Anyone who was there got a lot out of it and there was a buzz and energy. It was a very successful day, so well done!

Dave Anderson: 2:34

Thank you both. I didn't ask you for a lot of praise, so I probably should rephrase my question better! ServerlessDaysBelfast.com has all the details and content, and we'll be publishing videos of the talks soon. But I really enjoyed the event. The theme was'Building Beyond Boundaries'. We wanted to raise the bar and use the story of the Harland and Wolff Shipyard and Titanic. And the fact that Titanic was built in Belfast 120 years ago. Something like 1500 ships and ocean liners have been built there. So it was a centre of engineering 100 years ago. It was great to bring that back around to what we do. People were inspired to hear the stories of what happened then versus what we do now. It's a community event as well. So it's good to just bring everyone together to chat. And related to today's topic. it's very hard to measure that. You get 200-300 people in a room talking, learning, enjoying themselves and getting a bit of a spring to their step. It's very hard to put $1 amounts on what they bring back into their teams. It costs £60 per ticket and a day off work which is not expensive. But what you get from that, as an engineer,when you go back to your office is off the scale.

Mark McCann: 4:03

There are low barriers to adoption of what you hear or learn about at ServerlessDays. You may hear about a company adopting step functions, for example, and you can take that away and try it. There's no big licencing, installation or outlay of expense required. You can act on wondering if that'll work in your context, company or for the problem you are trying to solve. So the feedback loop from the content, speakers and great ideas and you applying them to your ecosystem, context and company is tight. It's hard to measure the impact that those little nuggets of wisdom have on junior or even well seasoned engineers. They'll take lots away and apply it to their business. And you may not ever hear how successful it was.

Dave Anderson: 5:13

I have a bee in my bonnet about people saying they're brilliant engineers. Brilliant engineers are curious and learn from other people. If you put a brilliant engineer in a silo and ask them to build by themsevles, they'll probably mess it up. You've got to have a curiosity, look outside your space and get influenced and inspired by others. That's how it works.

Michael O'Reilly: 5:34

It's one of the only events I've been to in a long time, where you're seeing the next iteration of something that is coming. There were nice talks on the front end and approaches for Serverless. And then there was Jeremy's concept in terms of what he's doing at Ampt. That's certainly a different way of thinking. How do you apply that and look at things from slightly different angles.

Dave Anderson: 6:08

Jeremy Daly did a brilliant job with the Keynote. And what he's doing at Ampt is inspiring. He's lifting the bar, not just one notch, many notches. So it's great to see that. I actually can't stand the phrase Serverless because it doesn't really communicate what we're doing, either at the event ServerlessDays, or in relation to what we do. And in relation to the next topic of the AWS Serverless DA Team, or Developer Advocacy Team. And to give you context, there's been a couple of things on Twitter this past couple of weeks about the guys and gals from the Developer Service DA team who are changing teams. I don't want to get into the internals of AWS like but I wanted to pay tribute to a strong team, that was led by James Beswick. And before that, by Chris Mullins. And I would say over the last 10 years, we've been lapping up their content, on Twitter, at conferences and on LinkedIn. My number one resource is the people on that team, where I basically learn all the stuff that we do. Let's discuss that team for a bit and the massive impact they've had on what we

Mark McCann: 7:32

They have had a huge impact and they are huge do. enablers for everything we've all done in our careers. And with the barriers that we were trying to push against, their content and the work that they did, gave us ammunition for challenging our status quo and context that we were dealing . So the external validation for our approach was coming from the Developer Advocacy Team. The blogs, patterns, examples, workshops, tutorials, or even getting some of them on calls and talking about the problems, we were having led to enablement and empowerment to try these things. And removed the barriers and friction we had. Kudos to them all.

Dave Anderson: 8:25

I don't know how to describe this properly and it's not meant to be personal but when you are trying to do something with step functions, and you need to know more about step functions. the sales guys on the phone will try to sell you more stuff. When you got one of the DA'a on the phone, they were able to say that's crazy, don't use that. Use EventBridge instead etc. They have you an honest answer based on their experience. So it was great to hear that unbiased opinion, they don't have any product interest, they're not trying to sell you something. It's just someone who's in the space, talks to lots of people, and they're good engineers. I find it super helpful and validating to hear their opinions on things. There were lots of times when you were thinking something and you thought 'hh, right, that's interesting'. And why did he say that? And then you realised that you were completely wrong.

Michael O'Reilly: 9:23

Amazon is a big company with a multitude of services available for teams like us to collaborate with in our day to day, and they're changing all the time. And a lot of stuff gets missed. If you're just looking through the list of change requests on a monthly basis. you can't appreciate what's changed or available. These guys do a good job of highlighting new things that come out by creating blogs and working examples to show you how these things are progressing. It makes it consumable and allows us to build. They are the engine that builds the movement and shows what others are doing and fleshes it out. Look at the podcasts they are doing and the content they produce. It's more consumable and leverageable. if you are reading it back, you're not appreciating all the things it could be used for. But when you see how someone actually does leverage it then that gets you thinking. They've breathed life into what's going on in Serverless. Julian's talk at ServerlessDays breathed life into concepts of flow control. That notation is really nice. Can we design this stuff in the abstract before we even consider services. You don't get that from reading the spec. you need the team to bring it to life. That's what they do and hopefully, that's what they continue to do.

Mark McCann: 11:34

With our modernisation, migration and enablement work for organisations, we avoided undifferentiated heavy lifting by pointing towards Serverless Land, the DA team and the patterns, examples, workshops and tutorials that they provided. We didn't have to create that content or those courses, tutorials, workshops or blog posts. We were able to build on top of what they already put in place. So we were standing on the shoulders of the giants. When we were trying to transform a large enterprise, we were able to tailor the content to move ourselves up the value chain. So we're basically standing on top of the work that they have enabled us to do.

Dave Anderson: 12:28

Let's be specific. When we think of the transformation at Liberty Mutual it was based on the content that the DA Team were pushing out. It was validation that we weren't making stuff up. Chris Munns formed the DA Team in 2015/16. We got to the point where we were asking what is he tweeting about? What's he talking about in the articles he is writing. And that was a pretty good steer. And then as the team grew, James Beswick had solid blog posts with good content. There were lots of good conferences and different events that they ran. Julian Wood came to the first ServerlessDays Belfast in 2020. I'm remember asking him to do a talk in Liberty IT, asking him to explain what Serverless is, in plain English. He sat and just explained and it was brilliant. He has been aceing AWS re:Invent. He regularly gets recognised for the best Serverless talk. People recognise him in the street and take photographs of him. He's like a rock star. Eric Johnson is absolutely unbelievable. He has been driving so many events and he is such a good speaker. Ben Smith created Serverless Espresso and brilliant step functions on EventBridge implementations. David Boyne with all the EDA stuff. EDA visualisations are incredible. And Marcia Villalba with her YouTube channel. It is a wealth of information. The Serverless Land site is my go to whenever anyone asks about the tech. Go read that site, here's a few articles, but just consume that entire site. And then we'll talk because that's our strategy.

Mark McCann: 14:31

We almost had our own internal Serverless Land with a mind map on this and a blog and the different EMP patterns all scattered around. Serverless Land brought it all together. So instead of own custom built resource, we can point people to Serverless Land. Even way back at the start, we were taking Chris Munns slides and putting them into our internal decks to drive messaging and create an environment where this messaging was slick.

Dave Anderson: 15:29

I've enjoyed our reflections and celebrations. There are a few other people in the team, but I'm talking about people who I personally know and worked with. They're all moving to different areas. And there's still a strong Developer Advocate movement within AWS. For me, Serverless is evolving. Ad there will always be a need for advocacy. What is hard about developer advocacy, or Dev Rel, is its measure of success. It can't be articles written or talks done It's hard to measure the impact, but I'm glad companies invest in Dev Rel, because it's how we learn.

Mark McCann: 16:19

The Serverless DA Team have had millions or even billions worth of impact. But because that type of enablement is so hard to measure, they'll probably never know?How many times has that pattern being leveraged in massive companies? How many times has that blog post inspired Fortune 100 companies to build and assemble this way? How many times have those slides helped convince the C suite that it is the way to go. It's hard to get tangible, quantifiable metrics on that. But in our experience and from prolonged, anecdotal, alternate metrics, there have been big outcomes driven from the work that they've done.

Dave Anderson: 17:09

When I was younger I was seeing some talk, or some guy with a ponytail who sad something interesting. But I could not remember who it was. There are 1000s of people like that, who just remember seeing a talk or live stream and it set them off on a path.

Michael O'Reilly: 17:41

Last week, we were having a conversation with Julian on opentelemetry and AWS disposition and we were opinionated from our perspective. Engineers, architects and developers have opinions but we discuss it with them. And you can rest assured, they're feeding back into AWS. They take our thoughts and opinions and help shape what's going on in terms of the roadmap and progress for the Cloud Provider. They can take on critical feedback and run with

Mark McCann: 18:31

I hope it continues with the evolution of developer it. advocacy in AWS and the feedback loop and shaping of product direction is still strong, and top of mind.

Dave Anderson: 18:44

I've had so many conversations where you ask for something and they're like, I'm not sure about that but why don't you contact the product team and explain what you're trying to do? Because they would love a customer testimonial or feature request. I'm looking forward to the content that they will continue to put out there. I'm looking forward to continue to follow them on their different channels. We can close off with the future of Serverless. I sense a shift coming. We've been about event driven architecture and EDA, recently. There is an evolution underway with some cool vendors out there, like Vercel and Momento. I find myself repeating that Severless is not just Lambdas or Functions.

Mark McCann: 20:09

Do you have situational awareness? Do you know the value chain that you're trying to bring to bear here? And what is the best technology or the best solution to deliver that value chain? And for us, the model was Serverless for a long time. But as things evolve, there are new capabilities and components that you can plug in or a SaaS offering. And you may not use Lambda or Step Functions. We've been using the words modern cloud, modern cloud solutions or modern applications for a while.

Michael O'Reilly: 20:50

There's a higher level of abstraction beginning to emerge that's encompassed in Serverless.

Dave Anderson: 20:57

That's the craic. It is good to reflect on the Serverless DA Team. A massive thank you to the extended team for all their work. Check out TheServerlessEdge.com and follow us on X or LinkedIn hit subscribe on YouTube.