Episode #103: Differing Serverless Perspectives Between Cloud Providers with Mahdi Azarboon

About Mahdi Azarboon

Mahdi Aazarboon started working as a serverless specialist and evangelizing it through blog posts, conference talks and open source projects. He climbed up the corporate ladder, and currently works as Senior Manager - Cloud Presales at Cognizant. He helps big and traditional corporations to move into the cloud and improve their existing cloud environment. Having a hands-on background and currently working at the corporate level of cloud journeys, he has matured his overall understanding of serverless.

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/azarboon/
Twitter: @m_azarboon

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QG-N3hf1zqI

This episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.

Transcript:
Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Mahdi Azarboon. Hey, Mahdi. Thanks for joining me.

Mahdi: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So, you are a senior manager for cloud pre-sales in the Nordic region for Cognizant. So, I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and what it is that you do at Cognizant?

Mahdi: Yeah. Just a little bit of background, I started as a full stack developer, then I joined Accenture as a serverless specialist, and over there I started to play with AWS Lambda specifically. Started to do some geeky stuff, writing blog posts, and speaking at conferences and so on. Then, I was developing several solutions for multiple corporations in Finland, then I joined another consultancy company, Eficode, which are known for DevOps. It is very good, they have a good reputation for that in Nordic region. I was as a practice lead, AWS practice lead driving their business. Then, I joined my current company, Cognizant, and here I work as a pre-sales capacity. I'm not hands-on anymore, but basically I do whatever is needed to make our customers happy and make them to go to the cloud. So that means high-level solutioning, talking with the customer and as a senior architect, I comment about stuff, I make diagrams, And I translate business and technical stuff requirements, basically as an interface between the delivery and the customer side. Yeah, that's all.

Jeremy: Right. Awesome. All right. Well, so you mentioned in some of the blog posts that you were writing and some of that was a little while ago. And it's actually, I think there is some interesting perspective there. So I want to get into that in a little while, but I want to start by this idea or this post that you wrote about sort of what you need to know about Azure functions versus AWS Lambda and vice versa and it was sort of this lead-in to this concept of multi-cloud and not cloud-agnostic like being able to run the same workloads, but being able to understand the differences or maybe some of the nuances in Azure versus AWS and of course, that got extended to GCP and IBM cloud and some of these other things. But I'm curious why understanding different serverless services or different cloud services across clouds in this multi-cloud world we are living in now, why is that so important?

Mahdi: Yeah. That's a good question. First of all, I would like to clarify that whatever I'm telling in this podcast is just my personal opinion and doesn't reflect my employer. This is just to save myself.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Like a standard Twitter handle route.

Mahdi: Yeah.

Jeremy: Views are my own, right? Yeah.

Mahdi: I don't want to answer to my boss after this podcast. Answering to your question, the thing is that multi-cloud is inevitable and even AWS which was ... In the best practices, I remember like a few years ago, they were saying that, no, try to avoid that. They started to even admitting through their offerings that they are trying to embracing that multi-cloud with their Kubernetes offerings. The thing is that, well, whether AWS fans like it or not, Azure is gaining a lot of market share and it depends on the country. For example, in Finland at least AWS is really popular. But now I'm dealing, for example, in other countries like Norway or UK, Azure is very popular. I mean, you can just exclude yourself to be only with one cloud, but in my opinion, you are missing a lot of opportunities, both to learn and just as a company to embrace the capacities, because whether ...

Well, Azure provides some stuff which are better than AWS. I mean, I heard from a corporation that they really like AI capabilities of Azure much better than AWS and they do a lot of analytics. So it's inevitable whether many people like to admit it or not.

Jeremy: Right. Right. But so even the fact that it's inevitable and we talk about, multi-cloud is one of those terms ... I just talked to Rob Sutter about multi-cloud a couple of episodes ago and it's so expansive. I mean, everything from SaaS providers to, obviously the public cloud providers, to maybe even on-prem cloud, I know that sounds weird, but like your hybrid cloud and things like that. So the problem is that there are a lot of providers, there are a lot of SaaS products, things like that. I mean, are you advocating that people will try to become experts in multiple clouds or how do you sort of ... What level of knowledge do you think you need to have in order to work across multiple clouds?

Mahdi: I haven't met a single person who can claim to be expert in more than one cloud provider and I have talked with many experts because I have been running serverless in Finland and so I have been talking with many experts. None of them dared to claim that they knew it. I mean, even keeping up with one single cloud provider is a lot of work and I don't consider myself expert in any of them either, because I'm not hands-on anymore. The thing is that ... No, you don't have to be experts to work with different stuff. Of course, at some level you need some ... For example, you might need an Azure expert to work with Azure, AWS expert to work with AWS. But in my opinion, if you really want to keep up with the technology and so you need to be good in one provider, really good with that and then, know the fundamentals of the cloud, the best practices which are, I would say, it's irrespective of which cloud provider you are using there and be willing to learn.

For example, it happened to me. At that time, I mean, when I wrote that blog post, I was only working with AWS. Then they said to me that, okay, you have this project on Azure, go for it and I never touched Azure before. It was a lot of pain, but I learned a lot. So I mean, as I said, the fundamentals are same and now be expert in one and be willing to learn. In my opinion, that should be good enough.

Jeremy: Right. I'm curious, I think that's good advice to sort of be well-rounded. I mean, that's always good advice I think for technologists, going a mile wide and an inch deep is usually good enough. But like you said, being able to be an expert in a specific field or a specific technology or something like that can really help. So you think that's certainly a good career choice to sort of start to broaden your perspective a little bit?

Mahdi: Definitely. Actually, I was one of those AWS fans that really was following this Hero, Serverless Heroes, and so on, basically was parroting whatever AWS was telling and I was saying that I just want to come to work with AWS. Actually, it happened ...