Episode #74: Measure and Increase Developer Productivity using Serverless with Vadym Kazulkin and Christian Bannes

 About Vadym Kazulkin

Vadym Kazulkin is Head of Technology Strategy at ip.labs GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of the FUJIFLM Group, based in Bonn. ip.labs is the world’s leading white label e-commerce software imaging company. Vadym has been involved with the Java ecosystem for over fifteen years. His focus and interests currently include the design and implementation of highly scalable and available applications, container and orchestration technologies and AWS Cloud. Vadym is the co-organizer of the Java User Group Bonn and Serverless Bonn Meetup, and a frequent speaker on various Meetups and conferences.

• Twitter: @VKazulkin
• LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/vadymkazulkin
• Email: [email protected]
• Presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/VadymKazulkin/measure-and-increase-developer-productivity-with-help-of-severless-by-kazulkin-and-bannes-sla-the-hague-2020-238115659

About Christian Bannes

Christian Bannes works as Lead Developer at ip.labs GmbH and has been working in the professional Java Enterprise environment for over ten years. In recent years, he has been working with AWS Cloud and especially with serverless applications. He is particularly interested in distributed architectures, domain-driven design, and functional programming.

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: www.iplabs.de

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QoKW1KR7rrM

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I am chatting with Vadym Kazulkin and Christian Bannes. Hey, Vadym and Christian. Thanks for joining me.

Vadym: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Christian: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Jeremy: Awesome. So you both work at ip.labs in Germany. And so I'd love to talk a little bit about what IP labs does and what you two are about. So let's start with you, Vadym. So you're the head of Technology Strategy. So why don't you tell the listeners a bit about your background and what ip.labs does?

Vadym: Yeah. I'm a Ukrainian native, but I live for 20 years now in Germany. I have been working with Java for 20 years but since three years, I'm involved in the migration stuff and AWS as a cloud provider of our choice. And I'm a part of the serverless community since two and a half years, involving me heavily in all this stuff and presenting ideas and our experiences mainly also with Christian. So this is what I do.

And ip.labs is software provider for designing and purchasing of photo products like prints, calendars, photo books, just where you can print your emotions. So they are part of the Fujifilm group, Europe. So founded 60 years ago, approximately 80 colleagues, 30 developers.

Jeremy: Awesome. And Christian, you are a lead developer there. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background?

Christian: Yeah, right. So I'm a software developer at ip.labs, also working about 20 years, almost only with Java technologies. So I'm working as scrum team. I think about three years ago we adopted serverless and we switched to TypeScript because it fits our need more than Java. And yeah, we are quite happy with serverless.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. So I have seen the two of you give a presentation. I know you've given this presentation a few times, about measuring and increasing developer productivity with serverless. And this is always to me a fascinating topic, because you see a lot of claims, right? And a lot of it is very anecdotal. I mean, it's like, "Oh, yeah. We were able to move faster with serverless." Or you hear things like that. But the two of you actually sort of did some research on this, dug into the background of this and really outlined this well, and I think it should be super important, or it's super important to share with listeners so that they understand why serverless is such a powerful productivity booster for software development.

So I'd love to start, like maybe way, way back in the beginning, and just talk about software development in general. So when you're building applications, and you're trying to create whether it's new stuff, and you're trying to build greenfield applications, or you're trying to work on legacy applications, what are the challenges when you are trying to, as a software developer, what are the challenges that you have to face?

Vadym: So I think that the best model to explain this is the cognitive load. And this is the term coined by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais in their recent book, Team Topologies. And the cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort being used for accomplishing the task. So accomplishing the software development tasks. And then they differentiate between three of them: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane. And probably intrinsic, is very easy to understand, because it's how you write Java class, TypeScript class, or use some framework of the day. So this is something that you can't offload, you have to learn this. So you have to own this also.

But then you have this extraneous load. And it's especially important to understand in our distributed world that many things are currently distributed. So just how to automate your tests, unit tests, integration, end to end web, mobile tests. How to build package, deploy, and run your application. How to configure, monitoring, alerting, logging, everything. So just operate and maintain infrastructure. So how to build fault tolerance system and resiliency and of course, security is also job number one. So just it's not only application security, but also preparation system, networking, hardware, everything. And just huge bunch and you haven't written even one line of productivity code, but you have to deal with all this stuff, probably. And I see a lot of companies which really struggle to deliver value if they go distributed because all of these challenges and distributed system are hard challenges.

Jeremy: Right. Yeah, then germane. So you've got intrinsic, you've got extraneous and then germane. What's germane?

Vadym: Germane is, this is your business logic. This your workflows, this is your core domain that you implement. So you have to become expert in the things which you are doing. So you have to understand what your core domains, what are your generic domains, like probably commercial system, e-commerce system, something like this. Every everybody needs payment, check-out, but it's probably not your core. So you'll have to reduce also this law to only things which really core and meant for your business. So these are three different cognitive load types. And if you think about this, so just, you want to reduce extraneous and germane load as much as possible to focus on the business stuff that matters.

Jeremy: Right. So the other thing we kind of talking about in here though, is like, again, if you're spending all this time writing or working on this extraneous stuff, obviously, it's taking away from you implementing something, and actually being able to ship some product. And this comes back to productivity. So what exactly do we mean by productivity too, because that's probably one of those things where I think people spin their wheels a lot and you check off a lot of to-do items, but is even figuring out how to implement something like to automate a...