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Episode #66: The Story of the Serverless Framework with Austen Collins (PART 1)
About Austen Collins
Austen Collins is the founder and CEO of Serverless, Inc. Austin is an entrepreneur and software engineer located in Oakland, CA. His specific focus is on building cheap, scalable Node.js applications while minimizing DevOps requirements as much as possible. An enthusiastic AWS Lambda user from day one, Austen founded the Serverless Framework (formerly JAWS), an open source project and module ecosystem to help everyone build applications exclusively on Lambda, without the hassle and costs required by servers.
- Serverless, Inc.: https://www.serverless.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/austencollins
Transcript
Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm speaking with Austen Collins. Hey Austen, thanks for joining me.
Austen: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.
Jeremy: So you are the CEO and founder of Serverless Inc. The creators of the Serverless Framework. So I'd love it if you could give me a little bit of your background and just in case somebody doesn't know what Serverless Inc is all about.
Austen: Yeah, sure. Quick background on us, we make the Serverless Framework which is an application framework that makes it really easy to build applications on serverless cloud infrastructure. That is infrastructure that's auto-scaling. You never have to pay when it's idle and scales pretty massively. And the goal is to help developers deliver software that has radically low overhead and all of these serverless qualities at the application level as a whole.
So that's our goal. We make Serverless Framework, that's what we kicked off with. And I was excited to chat with you because I was thinking it might be interesting not to do just such a technical conversation, which I'm sure you've done a handful of already. But maybe talk about the history of Serverless Framework a little bit, because the project is now five years old. I think this is my fifth year of serverless development, which is crazy to think about, because it feels like we're so early in this journey in general. But I was thinking you might be interesting to talk about kind of the history of like how things got started, how we got started and our perspective of just like kicking off the serverless movement and kind of, we know what that looked like in the early days and the crazy days where we didn't... I don't think anyone knew how big of a deal this was potentially going to be, or that this would have become a big category for cloud or maybe even the cloud itself.
And when you reached out to me to do this podcast, I thought this might be a great opportunity just to kind of tell that story, at least from our perspective, my perspective. Because I think it's a fascinating one, not just for technical people, but for makers and entrepreneurs, anyone who's trying to get something off the ground. I think there's just a lot of interesting lessons learned along the way.
Jeremy: Yeah. No, I think that is something that is really, really important for anybody in the serverless space. And I think anybody who's developing cloud applications today is to look back and see, I mean, where we were five years ago. Because it has dramatically changed in terms of the technology that we have available to us, the building blocks that we have available to us. And also I think, JAWS as it was originally, and we'll get into some of that, the original Serverless Framework, what that was able to do compared to what it can do now, but also compared to what's available now and just the massive explosion of development tools and observability tools and everything else that has kicked off. Open source projects beyond the framework that have kicked off that really have built this amazing community. So let's start there. Let's go way back to the beginning, like this we're talking 2014, right. Lambda is still in preview and then what happened?
Austen: Yeah, Okay. Going way back, a lot of the credit first goes out to the Lambda team, the visionaries over there who kind of basically disrupted how they do compute over at AWS. Which I've heard a lot about that story. I listened recently to your podcast with Tim Wagner, kind of talking about the early days of that, but really like a lot of what we're doing here with Serverless Framework and building out our developer tool suite is just kind of standing on the shoulders of the effort that those people did, which I'm sure was hard figuring out what that looks like inside of an organization as big as Amazon. And so our story really I'd say they did a lot of the hard stuff and a lot of the really meaningful stuff and kind of my story starts right out when they did that announcement at re:Invent 2014. Yeah. When it was in preview.
Austen: And I was looking around at everybody else and there was definitely some excitement and I was just personally so enthusiastic. There's something, it just hit a note in me that still is driving me to this day and inspiring me to this day to build great developer tools and really capitalize on what the potential I first saw when it came out and still until today. And that is like... This for me, it was, I guess, I don't know about you, but I actually never got into this to be a developer. That was not my personal goal when I was just getting started.
Again, I've always felt more like a creative type to be frank and more of an entrepreneur. And the programming, the development was kind of a means to an end, but also felt like potentially the greatest skill set to have at a time where the cloud programming gives you the ability to make anything, to solve any problem almost.
And I think a lot of my story and all the time that's gone into the Serverless Framework the same goes for the community members and whatnot. I think there's something similar where the people who are attracted to this are very much product focused. They really care about making things, they care a lot about the customer experience. And a lot of the technology is cool, but to some extent, we kind of want it to go the way so we could focus on the customer facing experience.
And that's kind of always been a strong theme for me personally. I see that in the serverless community everywhere, we've talked about it a lot and it was the thing I felt when Lambda first came out. I got so excited. It felt like for the first time there was really a technology where I could just put any logic out there and it would run for me, auto scale and charged me unless it was running.
And so that felt like amazing power. And I was looking around, there's definitely some excitement. It was so early in those days. I think AWS, maybe you remember this better than I do, but they were pitching it as like event-driven code kind of glue code. And there was no serverless category. There was no serverless buzzword or anything like that. It was kind of just a stitch together, kind of shuttle some data from one place to another largely from S3 and had very limited use cases at the time.
Jeremy: Right. If you remember all the way in 2015, even once it became generally available, there was no API gateway to connect. So you weren't able to do those web use cases, which again are probably one of the most prevalent things that serverless is doing now.
Austen: Yeah. Very limited. And I don't think all the pieces were there and enough of the pieces were there for people to get kind of the overall vision, maybe how meaningful it was, or at least how meaningful I felt it was. So I went away from tha...
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By Jeremy Daly & Rebecca Marshburn
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About Austen Collins
Austen Collins is the founder and CEO of Serverless, Inc. Austin is an entrepreneur and software engineer located in Oakland, CA. His specific focus is on building cheap, scalable Node.js applications while minimizing DevOps requirements as much as possible. An enthusiastic AWS Lambda user from day one, Austen founded the Serverless Framework (formerly JAWS), an open source project and module ecosystem to help everyone build applications exclusively on Lambda, without the hassle and costs required by servers.
- Serverless, Inc.: https://www.serverless.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/austencollins
Transcript
Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm speaking with Austen Collins. Hey Austen, thanks for joining me.
Austen: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.
Jeremy: So you are the CEO and founder of Serverless Inc. The creators of the Serverless Framework. So I'd love it if you could give me a little bit of your background and just in case somebody doesn't know what Serverless Inc is all about.
Austen: Yeah, sure. Quick background on us, we make the Serverless Framework which is an application framework that makes it really easy to build applications on serverless cloud infrastructure. That is infrastructure that's auto-scaling. You never have to pay when it's idle and scales pretty massively. And the goal is to help developers deliver software that has radically low overhead and all of these serverless qualities at the application level as a whole.
So that's our goal. We make Serverless Framework, that's what we kicked off with. And I was excited to chat with you because I was thinking it might be interesting not to do just such a technical conversation, which I'm sure you've done a handful of already. But maybe talk about the history of Serverless Framework a little bit, because the project is now five years old. I think this is my fifth year of serverless development, which is crazy to think about, because it feels like we're so early in this journey in general. But I was thinking you might be interesting to talk about kind of the history of like how things got started, how we got started and our perspective of just like kicking off the serverless movement and kind of, we know what that looked like in the early days and the crazy days where we didn't... I don't think anyone knew how big of a deal this was potentially going to be, or that this would have become a big category for cloud or maybe even the cloud itself.
And when you reached out to me to do this podcast, I thought this might be a great opportunity just to kind of tell that story, at least from our perspective, my perspective. Because I think it's a fascinating one, not just for technical people, but for makers and entrepreneurs, anyone who's trying to get something off the ground. I think there's just a lot of interesting lessons learned along the way.
Jeremy: Yeah. No, I think that is something that is really, really important for anybody in the serverless space. And I think anybody who's developing cloud applications today is to look back and see, I mean, where we were five years ago. Because it has dramatically changed in terms of the technology that we have available to us, the building blocks that we have available to us. And also I think, JAWS as it was originally, and we'll get into some of that, the original Serverless Framework, what that was able to do compared to what it can do now, but also compared to what's available now and just the massive explosion of development tools and observability tools and everything else that has kicked off. Open source projects beyond the framework that have kicked off that really have built this amazing community. So let's start there. Let's go way back to the beginning, like this we're talking 2014, right. Lambda is still in preview and then what happened?
Austen: Yeah, Okay. Going way back, a lot of the credit first goes out to the Lambda team, the visionaries over there who kind of basically disrupted how they do compute over at AWS. Which I've heard a lot about that story. I listened recently to your podcast with Tim Wagner, kind of talking about the early days of that, but really like a lot of what we're doing here with Serverless Framework and building out our developer tool suite is just kind of standing on the shoulders of the effort that those people did, which I'm sure was hard figuring out what that looks like inside of an organization as big as Amazon. And so our story really I'd say they did a lot of the hard stuff and a lot of the really meaningful stuff and kind of my story starts right out when they did that announcement at re:Invent 2014. Yeah. When it was in preview.
Austen: And I was looking around at everybody else and there was definitely some excitement and I was just personally so enthusiastic. There's something, it just hit a note in me that still is driving me to this day and inspiring me to this day to build great developer tools and really capitalize on what the potential I first saw when it came out and still until today. And that is like... This for me, it was, I guess, I don't know about you, but I actually never got into this to be a developer. That was not my personal goal when I was just getting started.
Again, I've always felt more like a creative type to be frank and more of an entrepreneur. And the programming, the development was kind of a means to an end, but also felt like potentially the greatest skill set to have at a time where the cloud programming gives you the ability to make anything, to solve any problem almost.
And I think a lot of my story and all the time that's gone into the Serverless Framework the same goes for the community members and whatnot. I think there's something similar where the people who are attracted to this are very much product focused. They really care about making things, they care a lot about the customer experience. And a lot of the technology is cool, but to some extent, we kind of want it to go the way so we could focus on the customer facing experience.
And that's kind of always been a strong theme for me personally. I see that in the serverless community everywhere, we've talked about it a lot and it was the thing I felt when Lambda first came out. I got so excited. It felt like for the first time there was really a technology where I could just put any logic out there and it would run for me, auto scale and charged me unless it was running.
And so that felt like amazing power. And I was looking around, there's definitely some excitement. It was so early in those days. I think AWS, maybe you remember this better than I do, but they were pitching it as like event-driven code kind of glue code. And there was no serverless category. There was no serverless buzzword or anything like that. It was kind of just a stitch together, kind of shuttle some data from one place to another largely from S3 and had very limited use cases at the time.
Jeremy: Right. If you remember all the way in 2015, even once it became generally available, there was no API gateway to connect. So you weren't able to do those web use cases, which again are probably one of the most prevalent things that serverless is doing now.
Austen: Yeah. Very limited. And I don't think all the pieces were there and enough of the pieces were there for people to get kind of the overall vision, maybe how meaningful it was, or at least how meaningful I felt it was. So I went away from tha...