As the benefits of serverless continue to grow, it’s more important than ever for companies to get involved and enable their app teams.

Remember when you were a kid and you really wanted to go to a concert but you knew your parents would say no?

You spend all this time arguing, preparing arguments, getting the names of friends who were leaving, and building a presentation to tie it all together. You present it with enthusiasm to listen to your parents…

“No.”

You of course ask why and you must urgently ” because I said So. ,

And that was it. You didn’t go to the concert, even though you really, really, really wanted to.

It made sense to you, your reasons were right and just, but your parents didn’t have it.

Same is happening with serverless.

talk about evangelist scalability, cost savingsAnd enhances credibility Serverless, yet the adoption rate hasn’t accelerated with large companies.

according to Serverless report status by DatadogWe have an ever increasing adoption rate of serverless services like fargate and container-driven lambda functions. But they are moving towards a true serverless experience.

A true serverless experience, in my opinion, ditches containers unless they are absolutely necessary. almost any problem can happen want more Can be solved with serverless services like Lambda, Step Functions, SNS, SQS and EventBridge.

But this message gets lost when contacted by many software companies. People have been doing software development in a certain way for decades, why change now? What will be the cost to the company?

We need people who come out there and prove it. Show how it scales to meet demand. Show how much money it saves. Show how much more time engineers have solving business problems Now that they don’t have to deal with hardware problems.

what do we need serverless capability,

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of visiting the Postman Customer Summit in Napa, Calif., and talking with their executives and senior tech industry leaders.

One topic that came up time and again was the concept of technical competence, In a sense, these capable teams acted as teams. scrum masters For other development teams. He was a technical field expert who coached, coached, overcame obstacles and provided valuable examples, context and proof of concepts to other teams.

Similar to a concept I described a few years ago internal startup, Building a competent team starts small with a narrow focus. In my case, we put together a team to find out the ins and outs of serverless.

For years I led a team of engineers on serverless and its practical use for our company. We started small, but as our expertise grew, so did our use cases. Eventually we got to the point where we built a legitimate production application and understood deeply how to design serverless scale and production-scale applications.

It was at this point that our serverless capable team was born. We had a strong team of engineers who were experts in serverless development who could provide real, production-level experience to other teams in the company.

They knew the answer, they were equipped with examples to solve the problems, and best of all: they were internal to the company, We didn’t have to pay for expensive consultants to come and advise. We had our own people who already had connections and connections around the company ready to spread the good word.

Serverless enablement is not just talking, but also walking.

Once we had a team that had the technical capability and know-how, it was time to spread the knowledge. Teach other teams how to be serverless and Use best practices we have established,

government is everything in any new technology, and building an expert team up front helped set it up.

A competent team not only provides a wealth of practical experience, but they also provide established governance rules. Standardization over open technology as widely as serverless offers tremendous benefits at far more than cloud costs. Providing governance enables continuity, guardrails and accelerated growth.

While the serverless community is getting bigger every day, you may still have issues finding answers to the tough business questions your company leadership may ask. The expertise of your competent team brings forth quick replies with proof. This provides a high level of confidence in the technological direction in which the company is headed.

I’ve had many conversations with companies that don’t understand serverless. They know the essence of what it offers but they fall into the trap of some common misconceptions associated with it.

The most common misconception I’ve heard about serverless is that it can’t handle advanced problems. Many times I will discuss the benefits of serverless when someone asks, “But what do you do about difficult problems?” I always answer that serverless can solve basically any use case (with a few exceptions), but it always falls on deaf ears.

What makes enabling teams so valuable is that when they relay a message like this, they can even prove it. They can point to existing software built in production and show that serverless can actually handle complex problems. Being able to completely eliminate misunderstandings is an important factor in the adoption rate of any technology.

Starting out with a capable team doesn’t have to be a significant effort. If you have decided to go serverless, you can start small. Build a team of engineers dedicated to research and development of serverless applications or components of your existing applications.

Let the team build experience and gain an understanding of technology. Let them be the experts. remember, This team will act as your internal advisor,

Building expertise takes time; You will not have your enabling team overnight. Allow the team to practice, iterate, design and build. With each iteration on the project, your team will get smarter and their skills will improve.

Once your team is established and their expertise is increased, start developing your governance standards. Let the experience they build guide the initial rules you create for other teams. Don’t rush towards the government. Build on your expertise and really understand technology at the top and bottom of the stack.

After establishing your governance, start adding team members to the mix with other development teams. Remember, the members of this team act as advisors and should be used as such. They bring their expertise to the table and help in training and enabling others.

Lego Groups is a classic example of getting started with serverless enablement.

At AWS re:Invent 2020, we talked about how LEGO.com uses serverless to accelerate innovation. In his talk he describes the process They went on to build their engineers on a new technology stack.

Serverless enablement is a modern take on a classic approach to incorporating a new technology stack into your organization. Build a team of experts, then let the experts spread the knowledge among your other teams.

Build a library of practical and real-world examples. Heck, build a production application. You’ll never have more solid evidence and better references than an app in production.

The whole purpose of a competent team is to make it easier for others to build. Unblock resources, answer questions, do the dirty work, and investigate new concepts and paradigms. R&D teams are not new, and most companies have them. But what separates a competent team from a standard R&D team is consulting.

Be sure to include team members on other development teams around your organization. To be successful, you need to spread the expertise of your competent team to others. If you didn’t, they would be considered just another app team.

It is a long and difficult process from beginning to end, but the end justifies the means. Serverless has tremendous benefits for any organization, and the number of use cases satisfied by it continues to grow.

Happy coding!