Welcome to "The Cloud Is Serverless" Newsletter.

Greetings!

I am so grateful thatyou signed up for my newsletter. I am a major fan of all things serverless and this newsletter is meant to help consolidate all of the news about serverless technology for you to read.

A little about me.

My name is Jason Smith but some people know me as “Jay”. I often get asked “which do you prefer” and I always say that I literally don’t care. I will respond to either and some people call me Jay, some call me Jason, it’s all the same to me.

I have nearly 20 years experience in tech, working in the field since my college days all the way to today. I used to have a computer company that I ran while in college then I moved to Austin to work on a startup. It didn’t expand in the way I wanted so I wound up getting a corporate job.

Since then, I have always worked at a hosting company, a SaaS company, and now a cloud company. To be more specific, I work for Google Cloud and have for the past 6 years as of this writing.

I have always had a passion for serverless technology (this is what I was trying to do with my startup back in 2010 and 2011). My full belief is that the cloud should be serverless. I see the use of VMs and now Kubernetes as stepping stones towards that vision.

You can learn more about me on my personal blog/site jasonsmith.io.

What is Serverless?

I would like to define serverless here as everyone may have a slightly different interpretation. While everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, for the purposes of this newsletter, I will define my perspective.

Now there is no such thing as “Serverless” in the sense that you are not running on servers. Every enterprise app runs on a server (most likely a series of servers) somewhere. Maybe it is hosted in their own datacenter or they are using one of the big public clouds.

"Serverless” is about perspective. It is a concept that needs to be viewed from the perspective of the end user, who is most often the developer. Serverless means that the servers have been completely abstracted away from the end-user. (You can find a more in-depth definition here at TechTarget).

You can deploy an application and not have to worry one bit about how many servers are used to run it nor having to configure a network or figure out how to expose the deployed service. It just works thanks to the abstraction layer that your cloud provider developed.

Another key component is the pay-per-use model. Ideally, an application or service deployed on a serverless platform can scale all the way down to 0 and scale infinitely (in theory) based on how much the service is being utilized. When you scale to zero, you pay nothing. This is amazing for spikey workloads.

Serverless isn’t entirely new. There have been many iterations of this concept over the decades of computing. A would say that Amazon Web Service’s deployment of Lambda gave new life to serverless. It was the first major Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offering and breathed new life into serverless compute.

The problem is that the concept of serverless seems to have been pinned to the concept of FaaS. Serverless is so much more than just FaaS and I want to share this knowledge with the world.

What to expect in this newsletter?

I will try to publish an article once every two weeks that will summarize the newest developments in serverless computing. I will talk about new product launches from existing players, interesting startups in the field, and also some examples of major firms that are utilizing serverless technology.

If you are a paid subscriber, you will get in-depth analyses of these stories and some commentary from me. Subscribers will also get access to the podcast when that launches in April/May 2024 time frame.

Subscribers will also get access to our community and be able to chat with me anytime they want.

I do work for Google Cloud but I assure you, I will be as unbiased as possible in these reviews. I obviously have some opinions but I want to bring value to my readers and do justice to the concepts of serverless computing.

You WILL NOT see me making any references to Google Cloud roadmaps or any other non-public information. I also won’t be making any references to my customers or calling our their architectures. Sorry but I don’t want to get in trouble and it also wouldn’t be good for anyone if I did.

ALL OPINIONS ARE MY OWN!