Episode 38: Must be Willing to Defeat the JSON Heretics

Do you understand how tabs work? How spaces work? Are you willing to defeat the JSON heretics? Most people understand the power of the serverless paradigm, but  need help to put it into a useful form. That’s where Stackery comes in to treat YAML as an assembly language. After all, no one programs processors like they did in the '80s with raw assembly routines and no one programs with C. Everyone is using a higher-level scripted or other programming language.

Today, we’re talking to Chase Douglas, co-founder and CTO of Stackery, which is serverless acceleration software where levels of abstraction empower you to move quickly. Stackery has an intricate binding model that gives you a visual representation - at a human logical level - of the infrastructure you defined in your application.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Stackery builds infrastructures by using best practices with security applications
• What's a VPC? Way to put resources into a Cloud account that aren’t accessible outside of that network; anything in that network can talk to each other
• Lambda layers let developers create one Git layer that includes multiple functionality and put it in all functions for consistency and management
• Git is an open-source amalgam of different programming languages that has grown and changed over time, but it has its own build system
• Stackery created a PHP runtime functionality for Lambda; you don't want to run your own runtime - leave that up to a Cloud service provider for security reasons
• Should you refactor existing Lambda functions to leverage layers? No, rebuild everything already built before re-architecting everything to use serverless
• Many companies find serverless to be useful for their types of workloads; about 95% of workloads can effectively be engineered on a serverless foundation
• Trough of Disillusionment or Gartner Hype Cycle: Stackery wants to re-engage and help people who have had challenges with serverless
• Is DynamoDB considered serverless? Yes, because it’s got global replication
• Puritanical (being able to scale down to zero) and practical approaches to the definition of serverless

Links:

• Stackery
• JSON
• AWS
• Lambda
• Aurora Serverless Data API
• Hype Cycle
• Secrets Manager
• YAML
• S3
• GitHub
• GitLab
• AWS Codecommit
• Node.js
• WordPress
• re:Invent
• Ruby on Rails
• Kinesis Streams
• DynamoDB
• Docker
• Simon Wardley
• Datadog