These days it seems like everyone’s walking around with their head in a cloud. On-prem hardware has an almost antiquated feel, while serverless options promise reduced cost, greater scalability, and increased team productivity.
But is that really the case? To find out, Jerome talked with Bill Wanjohi, a principal crafter at 8th Light, who brings deep experience in web services, relational databases, batch data processing pipelines, and the support systems needed to deploy, maintain, and secure them. In other words, he has a ton of experience helping organizations manage the tradeoffs of different approaches to server management.
In this conversation, they dive into the world of serverless architectures by looking back at its technical foundations—defining the first steps into the cloud, exploring unintended consequences created, and questioning whether stopping at Docker containers would’ve been preferable.
- (01:44) - Bill’s bona fides
- (04:07) - The technical foundation for serverless
- (05:12) - Hardware virtualization: the first sea change
- (08:40) - Proliferation of virtual private servers
- (11:51) - Docker containers: solving the portability problem
- (14:21) - Reintroducing old problems
- (17:17) - Defining serverless
- (20:25) - Containers as a Service
- (23:17) - An orchestration nightmare?
- (28:00) - The upside of AWS Lambda
- (36:07) - Is a serverless future inevitable?
Jerome Goodrich leads amazing software teams to design and develop thoughtful solutions to complex problems as a principal software crafter at 8th Light. He loves pairing strenuous hikes with deep conversations and is always trying to see things clearly and with an open heart. Jerome lives much of his life off of the internet, but he occasionally writes on his website.
Bill Wanjohi is a principal crafter at 8th Light who brings deep experience in web services, relational databases, batch data processing pipelines, and the support systems needed to deploy, maintain, and secure them. He’s currently leading a team of engineers building an auction platform with common building blocks, and he delivered an 8LU presentation on de-risking data migrations.
Prior to joining 8th Light Bill consulted as a generalist software engineer, began and led a DevOps practice at a fast-growing cloud-based product company, administered many flavors of relational and analytical databases in several contexts, and generally gravitated to messy systems problems.
Bill doesn’t consider himself a worrier by nature, but he doesn’t like getting caught flat-footed and has seen enough things go wrong that others might find him a tad paranoid.
You can listen to Collaborative Craft via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive notifications of the latest episodes. And if you enjoy what you’re hearing, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
This podcast was produced in partnership with Dante32.
