About Ben Ellerby

Ben is VP of Engineering for Theodo and a dedicated member of the Serverless community. He is the editor of Serverless Transformation: a blog, newsletter, and podcast which share tools, techniques, and use cases for all things Serverless. He co-organizes the Serverless User Group in London, is part of the ServerlessDays London organizing team, and regularly speaks about Serverless around the world.

At Theodo, Ben works with both new startups and global organizations to deliver digital products, training, and digital transformation with Serverless across London, Paris, and New York.

• Twitter: @EllerbyBen
• Blog: Serverless Transformation blog
• Newsletter: Serverless Transformation Newsletter
• Podcast: Serverless Transformation Podcast
• Theodo: theodo.co.uk

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Ben Ellerby. Hi, Ben. Thanks for joining me.

Ben: Hi, Jeremy.

Jeremy: So you are the VP of engineering at Theodo, and you were just recently named an AWS Serverless Hero, so congratulations on that. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about yourself and what Theodo does?

Ben: Ah yes. As you mentioned, I'm the VP of Engineering for Theodo. We help other companies launch digital products, be that startups, launching their initial MVPs, to large companies attempting a digital transformation. And more and more I'm helping our clients to use serverless. Be that through building their initial MVPs, but also training and upskilling their developers. So we're based in London, New York and Paris. And basically my role is to help coach our developers, and help us find the new technology areas we want to work on. And serverless has been highlighted as the main area we're trying to move towards. And many of our clients are starting to adopt serverless first architectures.

Jeremy: And what's your background?

Ben: My background, I've been at Theodo in London since we kicked off a team here about four years ago. Before that, a bit of time at IBM. And before that studying computer science.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. So you mentioned digital transformation, and we've heard this term a lot, especially over the last couple of years. And I think some people think that means sort of moving from on-prem to the cloud, or sort of modernizing things. But you've been using this term, serverless transformation more recently. And essentially, this is this idea of going, I guess your second move to the cloud. Right? So could you explain what you mean by serverless transformation?

Ben: Yeah, sure. So what you touched on was digital transformation was that initial move to the cloud, which smaller and larger companies have managed some, with varying degrees of success. I actually helped a company called Junction launch their initial product about two years ago, which is an AI service that helps large companies plan their migration to the cloud. And that was very much a lift and shift approach. But more recently, if we take the example of Junction, they've had more and more targets going to things like SaaS, and FaaS and serverless first approaches. When I talk about serverless transformation, I'm talking about startups who are launching their initial MVPs and doing that in a serverless first approach, but also larger companies who are trying to consolidate their developer resource by building serverless first architectures, rather than managing infrastructure. And more than just managing infrastructure, common application things like authentication, moving to that as a service and really leveraging everything as a service to focus their development teams on the core business value that they're adding, the distinct business logic that makes their company who they are.

Jeremy: Right. So I mean, it's more about that lift and shift approach. And I think we've talked about this on the show a number of times, that trying to just sort of move everything as is from your on-prem into cloud is a bit of a fool's errand, right? I mean you're essentially copying this local environment, but you're not getting the benefits of the cloud environment.

Ben: Sure. And it has some benefits like virtualization was an initial move. Containerization was another move. And now we're seeing sort of function as a service, and other things as a service. As soon as a further level of abstraction. The higher that level of abstraction goes, the more business value I think he gets.

Jeremy: Awesome. Right. You wrote a post called In Defense of the Term Serverless, and nobody seems to want to have this conversation with me anymore. Because I have been very outspoken. I had a post a while back called Stop Calling Everything Serverless, where I tried to essentially define what I thought the term serverless was. And for me, I look at it as not a technology, not a managed service, not FaaS, not some sort of a spectrum or a ladder or these other things that I think are really, really interesting ways to try to classify what it is, because it's such a hard term to sort of grasp. But I look at it more as sort of this process of using these services that don't require you to really have an active involvement in the management of the infrastructure.

And to extend that even further in some cases where possible where you don't have to even worry about the scaling or provisioning a cluster of something like, I don't know, a cluster of Elasticsearch or something like that. So I think this is a perfect opportunity because in this community now we have a lot of forward thinkers and I think we want to move past this idea of what is serverless? The problem is that our community is for the most part an echo chamber. Right? And we keep having this conversation every once in a while when somebody from the edge sort of asks us this question. So, I'd like to get your definition of serverless and why you think that term actually is really important.

Ben: And I think it's a long answer. So I've recently been working on the sort of preview chapter of the book, Serverless Transformation at any scale. And the first chapter of that deals with what is serverless? It talks about that move from virtualization to containerization and then function as a service. But then it talks about how it's not just function as a service, it's using cloud native technologies as much as possible, which makes it a hard thing. It's not a binary classification between serverless, not serverless. It's a polymorphic space that keeps changing and keep adapting. I think we can place different services on a spectrum of serverlessness. So Elastic Beanstalk is obviously not serverless, but it's more serverless than manually provisioning EC2 to instances that goes all the way up to using something like Cognito, which is very little code. It's really the cloud provider providing that logic for you.

So I think you can put things on that spectrum, but I don't think that's where the value is. ...