Building A Business On Serverless Technology

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June 4th, 2019

47 mins 13 secs

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About this Episode

Summary

Serverless computing is a recent category of cloud service that provides new options for how we build and deploy applications. In this episode Raghu Murthy, founder of DataCoral, explains how he has built his entire business on these platforms. He explains how he approaches system architecture in a serverless world, the challenges that it introduces for local development and continuous integration, and how the landscape has grown and matured in recent years. If you are wondering how to incorporate serverless platforms in your projects then this is definitely worth your time to listen to.

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  • Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Raghu Murthy from DataCoral about his experience building and deploying a personalized SaaS platform on top of serverless technologies

Interview

  • Introductions
  • How did you get introduced to Python?
  • Can you start by giving a brief overview of DataCoral?
  • Before we get too deep can you share your definition of what types of technologies fall under the umbrella of "serverless"?
  • How are you using serverless technologies at DataCoral?
    • How has your usage evolved as your business and the underlying technologies have evolved?
  • How do serverless technologies impact your approach to application architecture?
  • What are some of the main benefits for someone to target services such as Lambda?
    • What is your litmus test for determining whether a given project would be a good fit for a Function as a Service platform?
  • What are the most challenging aspects of running code on Lambda?
    • What are some of the major design differences between running on Lambda vs the more familiar server-oriented paradigms?
    • What are some of the other services that are most commonly used alongside Function as as Service (e.g. Lambda) to build full featured applications?
  • With serverless function platforms there is the cold start problem, can you explain what that means and some application design patterns that can help mitigate it?
  • When building on cloud-based technologies, especially proprietary ones, local development can be a challenge. How are you handling that issue at DataCoral?
  • In addition to development this new deployment paradigm upends some of the traditional approaches to CI/CD. How are you approaching testing and deployment of your services?
    • How do you identify and maintain dependency graphs between your various microservices?
  • In addition to deployment, it is also necessary to track performance characteristics and error events across service boundaries. How are you managing observability and alerting in your product?
  • What are you most excited for in the serverless space that listeners should know about?

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The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA