Episode #13: Managing a Serverless Engineering Team with Efi Merdler-Kravitz

About Efi Merdler-Kravitz

Efi is a software expert and currently the R&D director at Lumigo. Over the last 12 years, he has been working as a developer, team leader, group manager and director in the healthcare, mobile, security and agriculture industries. Recently, Efi has been working on developing serverless applications and building tools to make serverless easier.

• Twitter: @tserverless
• Lumigo: https://lumigo.io/
• Email: [email protected]
• Lumigo Twitter: @lumigo

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats.  This week, I'm chatting with Efi Merdler-Kravitz. Hey, Efi. Thanks for joining me.

Efi: Hey Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you are the R&D director at Lumigo. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and background and then what Lumigo is up to?

Efi: So as you said, I'm leading the R&D of Lumigo and I've been working on pure serverless applications for the last 2.5-3 years. And on a personal note, I think it's the best technology decision that I ever made. So a couple of words about Lumigo. Lumigo is a SaaS platform for serverless monitoring and troubleshooting. Basically, Lumigo connects to your AWS accounts and alerts when things go wrong and then tells you the entire story of the requests that lead to that issue so you can quickly get the root cause. Let me elaborate a little bit. When you break your application to small pieces following the microservice architecture, it becomes very hard to debug your application, by the way, both in production and in your local dev environment, and it becomes especially hard when using async components like SNS, SQS, Kinesis, etc. And as someone who worked with serverless extensively before, we understood the challenge here at Lumigo, and therefore we developed the platform to help developers like us to understand the environment quickly when something goes wrong.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, so we've had a couple of shows so far where we've talked about observability, and we've kind of gotten into all of that sort of stuff that Lumigo, I think, as a product does, which is really interesting. But I actually want to talk to you about this idea of managing a serverless engineering team because one thing that's kind of unique, I think about Lumigo is even other companies that are working on serverless products, they're not entirely serverless themselves. And Lumigo is. You pretty much manage an entire serverless engineering team, right?

Efi: Yeah, we are 100% serverless from deployment, packaging, monitoring. Everything is serverless. We don't use any physical or virtual servers in our back.

Jeremy: Awesome. That's so cool. So alright. So you’re a manager. You've been doing this for a very long time. You've been managing engineering teams. And so I really want to get into this idea of what’s sort of different about managing a serverless engineering team versus managing a traditional engineering team. And I know maybe some people are thinking, “Well, you know what's the difference?” But I think there is. And I think you think there are some differences. So maybe we start first by what we have to do to sort of move our team to serverless. So if we've got, for an established organization, you know, it is great to be a greenfield startup and be exploring new things. But most companies are not. Most companies are established companies with legacy systems and so forth. So how do we go from you know this idea of taking a team that's used to working with all these different services and EC2 and containers or whatever, and moving them to something that's a lot more serverless. So maybe we start with that. What's the first step to getting people to move teams to serverless?

Efi: Great question, Jeremy. So I think that the best advice to any new beginning, especially in the technology world, is to start small. Try to taste the technology before jumping headfirst. So what does it mean in our case? First of all, I think you should ignore buzzwords. You hear a lot about new cool services. For example, AWS have dozens of ways to save data, where you have the ability to run machine learning on it. Try to use simple, trusted, and well-documented services I think services like API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, of course. These are the services that are the building blocks of any serverless application in AWS, and there's a good chance that you use at least one of them in the final solution. Try to use the simple version of services. What do I mean by simple? For example, in AWS, you have six or seven services that provide queuing capabilities. There's a good chance that choosing SQS, at least in the beginning, when you start is good enough. Avoid more complicated services like Kinesis. And you know, in the end, what they say, no one was ever fired for choosing SQS. So I think it's a good choice. And read and learn. Many people think that serverless identical to previous technologies that they use. And sometimes they forget that serverless is not only a new technology but also a different way to approach development. There are many great blog posts, newsletters, and, of course, for specific AWS services, read the AWS documentation. They are a great source of information. Choose a good framework that will help you with the transition. There are many good ones like AWS SAM, the serverless framework, Chalice or Zappa if you work for Python, and don't forget other practices that you used in the past. If you used .Node and Express the past, then AWS released, I think a couple of years ago, a framework called AWS Serverless Express. It's a framework that was released by AWS to help you in the transition. So if you are familiar with Node and Express, it will help you in moving to the serverless world. For example, in the Python world, if you use Django or Flask, then you can use Zappa, which I think is a great choice for the transition. So you don't need to change your methodologies, at least in the beginning because eventually I think, that these frameworks, for example, the framework AWS provides, and the framework that Zappa provides in the end, don't provide the code that should be running in the serverless environment. But at least in the beginning, they remove a lot of overhead from your head.

Jeremy: Right? And so what about the transition? I mean, do you just transition the whole team right away? Or do you pick like a point person to do something like that?

Efi: I think that especially serverless, which is something that is just very new, I think you should lead the way as a manager. As I said before, serverless is not only technology. It also shapes the way you develop software. Therefore, you as the leader has the service responsibility of how your software team works and delivers. You need to master the tools of the trade. So before giving it to anyone in your team, make sure you sit down and learn it on your own. Again, as I said earlier, read the blogs, do the tutorials, read as much information as possible before moving the entire team or transitioning the entire team.

Jeremy: I think also, it's one of those benefits of being an engineering manager where you get to try out some of that cool stuff first, before you let anybody else use it.

Efi: Exactly, exactly. You know, most of the time you do the boring stuff, and now you have a chance to start something new....