Episode #45: Serverless Use Cases with Gareth McCumskey (Part 1)

About Gareth McCumskey:

Gareth McCumskey is a web developer with over 15 years of experience working in different environments and with many different technologies including internal tools development, consumer focused web applications, high volume RESTful API's and integration platforms to communicate with many 10's of differing API's from SOAP web services to email-as-an-api pseudo-web services. Gareth is currently a Solutions Architect at Serverless Inc, where he helps serverless customers planning on building solutions using the Serverless framework as well as Developer advocacy for new developers discovering serverless application development.

• Twitter: @garethmcc
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garethmcc
• Portfolio: gareth.mccumskey.com
• Blog Posts: serverless.com/author/garethmccumskey/

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q3tbdlHH0Mg

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with Gareth McCumskey. Hey Gareth, thanks for joining me.

Gareth: Thanks so much for having me Jeremy.

Jeremy: So you are a solutions architect at Serverless Inc. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do as a Solutions Architect?

Gareth: Sure. So, going back a bit, I mean I've been a web developer for a few years now coming up to 15 years. It doesn't feel quite as long as that, and I actually started back in the days of building a PHP web frameworks and so on. And my first start with serverless was back in 2016 where I actually, was taking over the lead of a team at the time.

And part of my job there was to try and help modernize this aging WordPress monolith that had been the company's entire online presence at the time. And the company, they sold tours online. And online was the only way that they sold their product. So it was quite important to have this product working well. And then I was going through the usual steps, just taking a look at how we could potentially modernize things, looking at the Laravels and Symfonys of the time.

And I was chatting to one of the guys at Parallax Consulting who had helped this company set everything up on AWS. Get all the VMs up and running in the load balances and so on. And one of them suggested that I take a look at the serverless thing that one of their team had spotted. So I thought, well, let me give it a try. Let me give it a... We see what this thing is.

And that really ended up being my road down into serverless, because the moment I picked serverless up and started looking at potentially building a RESTful API out of serverless to help modernize the architecture for the company, that was me. I was down the road and started building a POC. And the POC we had was just to take one small portion of the existing stack and replace it with something completely based off of serverless.

Something that received reasonably high traffic that wasn't super critical for the running of the organization. So if it failed, it wasn't a train smash. But if it succeeded, it would give us a great indicator that this was something we could definitely move forward with in the future. And ultimately the POC was a raging success.

Everybody in the organization was incredibly impressed with how well this serverless tech that we built. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn't even the best architect serverless tech in the world, but it still performed incredibly well, which was quite impressive at the time. So yeah, we were really happy with that. That essentially solidified serverless for me and the way forward for me in the future.

Jeremy: Awesome. And so then you started working at Serverless Inc as a solutions architect. So what are you doing there now?

Gareth: So now I'm involved with the growth team and being a startup the roles are quite mixed, so I'm called a solutions architect. But I end up doing a lot of different things. One of my main roles is involved in support of our paid product. Serverless Framework Pro dashboard, I help users who are using our product and helping them deploy it and set things up. We have a number of users who need support and help and assistance in setting up their serverless architectures and designing those sort of architectures around their use cases.

That's a really interesting job where you get to see quite a variety of ways that organizations are using the Serverless Framework. And it also means I'm working on content all the time, so I'm writing blog posts, producing videos, talking to the community, doing talks, all the usual sort of developer relations side of things as well. Keeps me quite busy.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, so since you are so deep into this stuff now, and again, you're working with a bunch of different clients with Serverless Inc, you're writing these blog posts, you've been doing this for quite some time now. I mean, I think you started what? Around 2016 or so working on serverless. Is that about right?

Gareth: Yeah, I started in 2016 building serverless applications for the first time, and last year I joined Serverless Inc themselves. Yeah.

Jeremy: Right. So in terms of experience with serverless, you probably have the most amount of experience you can possibly get, right? Because this is such a new thing. So you've been doing it for a while, you've been seeing all these different things. And one of the things I think is really interesting for people to be able to see and especially people who are new to serverless is this idea of what are the use cases that you can solve with it. Right?

And it's funny, if you're familiar with James Beswick, he has this sort of joke that he used to do it and in one of his presentations where he thought serverless was just for converting images to thumbnails. Like that was sort of like a very popular use case way back, when this first started to become a thing. And obviously you see a lot of things like web APIs and some of this other stuff.

But I'd love to talk to you about that today. Because I think there are a broad range of serverless use cases. And I'm probably in the camp of you can basically do anything you want with serverless. There may be a few exceptions here and there. But maybe you can just give us a... What do you see as like the most popular serverless use case?

Gareth: All right. Now by far the most popular use case is using serverless to build APIs. Whether that'd be a RESTful API or even a GraphQL API. And that's hands down the most common use case at the moment. And I think that was primarily pushed by the fact that API Gateway is actually such a great technology to use for building APIs, specifically RESTful APIs because it just takes away so much of that headache of trying to manage where web servers, load balancing them, a whole bunch of features that it includes to help you build your APIs, including things like JSON Schema requests Syntax, API keys that you can use to throttle users on your APIs and a bunch of others.

I mean, it's an amazing technology and then you combine that with the power of something like Lambda in the backend that you can use to receive these requests, process them and glue all the other managed services that you may need like Dynamo...