Serverless is gaining more and more popularity. What can we expect from it in the future? — I am a cloud architect for my day job. I don’t code as much as I did when I was a developer. Instead, I spend my time thinking about the future. …

When designing an application, you need to plan for three steps in the future — A few years ago, I was asked to design a standalone application. It had a singular purpose and was meant to be used independently of any other application we had at my company. So I took the requirements and designed an application that was just that. It had everything self-contained…

When talking about vendor lock-in, people rarely talk about data gravity. Do you need to consider it when going serverless? — When I got started with serverless a few years ago, you could rarely have a conversation about it without hearing the phrase “ vendor lock-in “. For those of you lucky enough to have not heard that phrase before, it means that by committing to use a specific vendor you…

Plus some bonus tips on how to get started — This is my 100th blog post! To some, that seems like a huge number. To others, it seems like I’m just getting started. To me, it sounds like I’ve put way more time and effort into blogging than I originally thought I would. My first blog post was published on…

Transitioning to an API-first development strategy is hard work. Here’s what to expect in your first month. — For the past few years, I’ve been leading teams of serverless engineers to build some innovative new cloud products. I thought I was the hip, forward-thinking manager by saying we were going to do API-first development. We ran with it for years but it wasn’t until I attended the Postman…

As the benefits of serverless continue to grow, it’s more important than ever for companies to get involved and enable their app teams. — Remember when you were a kid and you really wanted to go to a concert but you knew your parents would say no? You spend all this time preparing arguments, counterarguments, getting the names of the friends who were also going, and building a presentation to tie it all together…

Designing for the right amount of scale is a huge architectural task. With serverless part of it is handled for you, but for some of it, you’re on your own — One of the benefits you’ll hear when people pitch you on serverless is that “it handles scaling for you and you never have to worry about it.” Man, I wish that was true. It’s not. What is true, is that your cloud vendor does handle the scaling events for you…

When designing an application using managed services, you have to know the service limits so you don’t get any surprises in production — As a solutions architect, I attend project design meetings fairly regularly. One of the things I always listen for in these meetings is the phrase “ we can’t use service X because the service limit is too low.” Believe it or not, I hear it fairly regularly. I’m sure the…

Learn how to handle errors in your event-driven workflows from a low, medium, and high level. — A few years ago when I got into serverless development and event driven architectures, there was so much of mystique and wonder. …