Episode #95: Going Serverless with IBM Cloud Code Engine with Jason McGee

About Jason McGee

Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, is VP and CTO at IBM Cloud Platform. Jason is currently responsible for technical strategy and architecture for all of IBM’s Cloud Platform, across public, dedicated, and local delivery models. Previously Jason has served as CTO of Cloud Foundation Services, Chief Architect of PureApplication System, WebSphere Extended Deployment, WebSphere sMash, and WebSphere Application Server on distributed platforms.  

• Twitter: @jrmcgee
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrmcgee/
• IBM Cloud Code Engine: Learn more during this live virtual event on April 14th (also available on-demand after April 14th)
• Read more: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/code-engine
• Get started today: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/codeengine?topic=codeengine-getting-started

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yH_mgW2kGzU

This episode sponsored by IBM Cloud.

Transcript:
Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm joined by Jason McGee. Hey Jason, thanks for joining me.

Jason: Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you are an IBM fellow and the VP and CTO of the IBM Cloud platform. So I'd love it if you could tell our guests a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do at IBM.

Jason: Sure. I spend my day at IBM worried about developers and platform services on our public cloud. So I'm responsible for both the technical strategy and the delivery of our Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms, our serverless environments, and kind of all the things that surround that space, logging, and monitoring and other developer tools that kind of make up the developer platform for IBM Cloud.

Jeremy: And what about yourself? What's your background?

Jason: Been a software, kind of middleware guy, my whole life. I used to be the chief architect for WebSphere app server. So I spent the last 20 plus years working on enterprise application platforms and helping companies be able to build mission-critical business systems.

Jeremy: Awesome. So I had Michael Behrendt on the show not too long ago and it was great. We talked about a whole bunch of different things. IBM's point of view of serverless. We talked a little bit about the future of serverless and we talked about the IBM Cloud Code Engine, which I want to get into, but for the benefit of our listeners and just because I'm so fascinated by some of the things that IBM is doing now with serverless, it's just super interesting. So could you sort of give me your point of view or IBM's point of view on serverless and just sort of refresh the listener's memory sort of about how IBM is thinking about serverless and how they're probably thinking about it maybe differently than some of the other cloud providers?

Jason: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's such a fascinating space and it's really changed a lot, I think, over the last five years or so from its kind of maybe beginnings in being very aligned with serverless functions and kind of event-driven computing and becoming a more general concept about how developers especially can consume cloud platforms. I think if you look at the IBM perspective on serverless, there's a couple layers to the problem that we think about. First is we've been pretty clear that we think Kubernetes and distributions of Kubernetes like OpenShift are kind of the key foundation compute environment for developers to use going forward. And we've done a ton of work in kind of building out our Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms and delivering them as a service on our public cloud. And that's an incredibly flexible platform that you can really build any kind of application. I think over the last five years, we've proven we can run anything on Kubernetes databases and AI and stateless apps and whatever you want.

Jeremy: Right.

Jason: So very, very flexible. However, sometimes flexible also means complicated and it means that there's lots to manage and there's lots of concepts to get your head around. And so we've been thinking a lot about, well, how do you actually consume a platform like Kubernetes more easily? How does the developer stay more focused on what they're really trying to do, which is like build application logic, solve problems? Now they don't really want to stand up coop clusters and configure security policies. They just want to write code and run code and they want to get the power of cloud to do that. Right? And so I think serverless has kind of morphed to be, for us, more about the experience that we can build on top of that container platform that's more oriented around how developers get work done and allows them to kind of more easily take advantage of the scale and power of public clouds without having to kind of take on the burden of a lot of that kind of work and management.

And so the work that we've been doing is really aligned in that direction, that we've been working in projects like Knative, in the open source community to build simpler abstractions on top of Kubernetes. And we've been starting to deliver those in our cloud through things like Code Engine.

Jeremy: Yeah. And I think that's interesting too because I always have, this is probably the wrong way to say it, but it's sort of a chip on my shoulder about Kubernetes because it just got so complicated. Right? It's just so many things that you have to do, so hard to manage. And as a serverless guy myself, I love just the simplicity of being able to write some code and just get it out there, have it auto scale, tie into all those events. So I think that a lot of cloud providers have sort of moved that way to say like, "Well, we're going to manage your Kubernetes cluster for you." Right? Which essentially is just, I think moving backwards, but also moving forwards at the same time, if that makes sense. But so in terms of the use cases that this opens up because now you're not necessarily limited to a sort of bespoke implementation of some serverless platform, you have a lot more capabilities. So what types of use cases does this open up?

Jason: Yeah. I mean, I may have a couple of comments on that. I mean, so I think with Kubernetes, you have the complexity of managing the Kubernetes environment, but even if that's totally taken care of for you, and even if you're using a managed Kubernetes service like the things we offer on IBM Cloud, you still have that kind of resource burden of using Kubernetes. You have services and pods and replica sets and namespaces and all kinds of concepts that you have to kind of wrap your head around and know how to use in the right way. And so there's a value in like, "Can we abstract that? Can we move away from that?" And it's not like this idea hasn't been tried before. I mean, we've had paths platforms, like kind of Cloud Foundry style, Heroku, very opinionated paths environments in the past and they definitely simplify the user experience. However, they came with this negative, which is if you don't fit within the box of the o...