The world around us is filled with shortcuts. Several shortcut avenues teach you to write Lambda functions. This fast-food style of learning is good only up to and until the food lasts. To sustain your appetite, you need to keep ordering more.
To be successful in serverless, you must keep learning.
Paul’s article focuses mainly on learning and how people who enter serverless often struggle to get grips with the technology and its ecosystem. As Paul describes, for someone new to serverless, even the concept of single-purpose Lambda functions itself takes time to digest.
To be successful in serverless, you need to take many strides once you get to grips with single-purpose Lambda functions. Several areas act as stepping stones for you to progress towards a successful destination that requires many hops, and you gather many traits along the way.
I often highlight how serverless brings engineering diversity to teams. This realization is essential if you want to make serverless easy.
Engineers should be guided, nurtured, mentored, or trained (or whatever the terminology is used in your organization) to make them understand stakeholder requirements, allow them to propose architectures, instill in them the benefits of single-purpose functions and microservices, show them how to incorporate security, teach them the observability principles, let them deploy to production, and tag them as owners of their services. These won’t come overnight or from watching a few videos on YouTube. This is where quality training and a long-term people growth strategy come in.
Try not to restrain engineers with corporate bureaucracy. Allow them the freedom to learn new things, attend conferences, and be part of technical workshops and collaborative activities.
I was chatting to an engineering manager at a conference. She opined that workshops such as EventStorming and Architecture Katas that span for a couple of hours or more are a waste of time and affect the team’s productivity. So I asked her how she would handle productivity if a couple of opportunity-denied and disgruntled engineers called in sick for a day or two. She didn’t have an answer!
Serverless boot camps are a simple way to equip engineers with the basics of the serverless technology ecosystem. Some organizations have successfully implemented such programs. Matt Coulter, an AWS Hero, once mentioned a successful program for new starters in place at Liberty Mutual. Organizations often deprioritise such initiatives citing budget constraints without even assessing the benefits they bring in.
One of the challenges when it comes to serverless training is the quality and coverage of technical, developmental, architectural, and operational elements in the syllabus. Amongst several courses, I have heard great feedback on Yan Cui’s Production-Ready Serverless training workshop. Yan is an AWS Serverless Hero and a powerhouse of serverless knowledge.
Make engineers understand stakeholder requirements, allow them to propose architectures, instill in them the benefits of single-purpose functions and microservices, show them how to incorporate security, teach them the observability principles, let them deploy to production, and tag them as owners of their services.