Hear Tim Wagner, CEO and co-founder of Vendia and "Father of Serverless" talk about the evolution of Serverless over the years and how Vendia is taking it into a cross-cloud future.

1. Serverless:
Past, Present, and Future
Dr. Tim Wagner
Co-founder and CEO, Vendia

2. The Past: The Age of PaaS

3. 2013: The Age of PaaS and the Dawn of Serverless

4. It’s 2013, and the world is obsessed with the wrong question...
“What’s the easiest way to deploy
a monolithic web app onto a farm
of servers?”
Answers:
● Heroku
● Beanstalk
● Azure PaaS
● Google AppEngine
● Engine Yard
● ...

5. Better questions:
What’s a simple model for
running code in the cloud?
Can running code be as simple
as using S3?
How can we add event-based
reactors to cloud activities?
Answer
Serverless functions

6. AWS Lambda, circa 2015
Events Mobile IT automation
(cron jobs)
λ
% for file in x y z …
% do
%
Unlocks the
early market!

7. The Present: The Age of Features

8. The Present: The Age of Features
DB Connectors
Infinite file storage (aka
AWS Lambda+EFS)
HTTP Front End
(Google CloudRun)
Workflows (Azure
Durable Functions)
AWS Lambda
Savings Plan
SLAs
Monitoring (XRay,
Thundra, Lumigo)
SQS FIFO Event
Sources
Event Hubs
Enterprise Development
(Stackery, Serverless
Framework)

9. What are the wrong questions in 2020?
“Can I run a function for a week?”
“How do you run serverless on-
prem?”
“Is Kubernetes Serverless?”
“Can I port my rails monolith to
Lambda?

10. The right question today? ...
Q: Why are servers and containers
still attractive to smart, overworked
developers free to choose any
technology?
A: Because the search for simplicity
and power is far from over.

11. Simplicity
Flexibility
The Tricky Balance

12. 2019 re:Invent: Making Lambda competitive with Servers
Customer Need re:Invent Launch
“Guaranteed low latency” Provisioned Capacity
“Use SQL DBs effectively” DB Connection Pooling
“Get rid of cold starts” “Instant on” VPC

13. Simplicity
Flexibility
!!
!

14. Complexity
Mini servers
server: n. Any long-lived bundle of configuration and state unrelated to
your business that requires operational attention for your app to survive.

15. Tim’s 2020 AWS wishlist:
● 1ms billing and Lambda Spot
● stable & proportional network bandwidth
● gRPC support everywhere
● built-in layers for popular languages & libraries
● Copy command, “global” Lambdas
● easy-to-use “exactly once” switch
● “sticky” streaming data (Lambda-to-Kinesis shard affinity)
● Finish Step Functions - resource policies, cross-account & cross-region tasks,
debugger, more service integrations, lower prices, …
(Read the full list at https://medium.com/@timawagner/tims-take-re-invent-2020-serverless-wishlist-7f0756da4cd0)

16. Ecosystems are Critical to Enterprise Adoption
AWS
Stackery
Serverless
Framework
Thundra
Lumigo
vfunction
Epsagon stdlib
PureSec

17. The Future

18. Moore’s Law is dead
(for CPUs and memory)
Source

19. Moore’s Law is dead alive for networking!
Key Insight #1
Stagnant CPU & memory +
faster networking favors
distributed systems over shared
memory for parallel algorithms
Key Insight #2
Where is a ton of silicon
connected with high-speed
networks in an easy-to-use
packaging?
AWS Lambda!

20. But,...
Distributed computing research models capacity as fixed
but time as unlimited.
With serverless, time is limited, but
capacity is effectively infinite.
Time for some new research!

22. The Future
1. Supercomputers are
serverless.
2. Infrastructure goes SaaS.

23. How many engineers does it take to
start a software company?
2000: 50-100
Build a data center from hardware
2015: 10-20
Build a distributed system out of EC2s
2020: 1-4
Build an app from managed services

24. Classic SaaS Makes Everyone Happy:
Customer gets
Leverage
● Lets 1 person do
the work of 10
● APIs versus staff
● “Experts in a
box”
● No deploys!
Both get
Abstraction
● Customer UI: “Run payroll”
● Backoffice:
○ File taxes
○ Run computations
○ Integrate with accounting
○ …
Company gets
Multi-tenancy
● Stand up one
database, serve 1M
customers with it
● Marginal customer
cost ~$0
● No customer
environment woes!

25. Can this apply to “infrastructure” products?
Customer gets
Leverage
● Lets 1 person do
the work of 10
● APIs versus staff
● “Experts in a box”
● No deploys!
Both get Abstraction
● Customer UI:
“invoke”
● Backoffice:
○ Security checks
○ Scale capacity
○ Keep servers alive
○ Routing
○ Requests
○ Latency
optimization...
Company gets Multi-
tenancy
Uh oh. That means
customers share
accounts.

26. Can this apply to “infrastructure” products?
Customer gets
Leverage
● Lets 1 person do
the work of 10
● APIs versus staff
● “Experts in a box”
Hell yeah!
Both get Abstraction
● Customer UI:
“invoke”
● Backoffice:
○ Security checks
○ Scale capacity
○ Keep servers alive
○ Routing
○ Requests
○ Latency
optimization...
Company gets Multi-
tenancy
Uh oh.
Noisy neighbors,
shared limits and
throttles, security
issues, side-channel
attack concerns if you
run code, ...

27. STAMTI: Single-tenant accounts on Multi-tenanted Infrastructure
User Account 1 User Account 1Firewall
Single Tenant Accounts
● Same security model as deploying it
yourself
● Operational isolation - no “noisy
neighbors”, no shared throttles or
limits
● Precision billing
● Easy deployments with existing tech
(like the AWS CDK)

28. STAMTI: Single-tenant accounts on Multi-tenanted Infrastructure
User Account 1 User Account 1Firewall
Multi-Infrastructure Tenancy
● All the benefits of serverless resources:
low cost, built-in fault tolerance,
automatically scale per request
● Economies of scale - virtually
unbounded scaling coupled with low
marginal cost structure
● 100% utilization by design
Multi-tenanted, fully-managed services

29. The Future
1. Supercomputers are
serverless.
2. Infrastructure goes SaaS.
3. ???

30. 2013: The wrong question is how to
deploy a monolithic web app better.
What’s the wrong question in 2020?

31. Answer:
How do I make my code portable?

32. “I can’t wait to port my code and data
from one public cloud to another!”
--said no one, ever

33. The right question: How can I share
data and code across companies,
clouds, and tech stacks?*
*and still get serverless benefits
Portability == least common denominator

34. Don’t port.
The right question: How can I share
data and code across companies,
clouds, and tech stacks?*
*and still get serverless benefits

35. Don’t port. Share.
The right question: How can I share
data and code across companies,
clouds, and tech stacks?*
*and still get serverless benefits

36. The Future
1. Supercomputers are
serverless.
2. Infrastructure goes SaaS.
3. Serverless apps get their
state back, go multi cloud
stack
company
region
account

37. Single-server
application
DegreeofScale
Centralized cloud
applications

38. Mobile and web
clients, conventional
blockchains
Single-server
application
Low Degree of Replication High

39. Mobile and web
clients, conventional
blockchains
Single-server
application
Centralized cloud
applications
Low Degree of Replication High
DegreeofScale
What if...

40. Mobile and web
clients, conventional
blockchains
Single-server
application
Centralized cloud
applications
Low Degree of Replication High
DegreeofScale

41. Serverless
Pros
scalable, pay-per-call, no
server hassles, ...
But…
Single account, single vendor,
(mostly) single region,
no built-in state support

42. DApps / Blockchains
Pros
cross-company, cross-cloud,
replicated state model
But…
Slow, can’t scale (single-box!!),
server hassles, hard to
integrate with public cloud,
requires learning new
languages, ...

43. Vendia
Universal
Apps
Cross-cloud,
cross-account
Serverless
Serverless
apps finally
get state!
Fast,
serverless
distributed
apps
Blockchains
finally get
hyperscale!

44. Vendia’s Serverless, Distributed Platform:
replicated NoSQL data & ledger, Serverless Smart Contracts using Functions
Vendia: A Cross-Cloud Decentralized Platform
Multi-account
Virtual Data
Lakes
ML training on
multi-party
data
Cross-company
Supply chain
solutions

45. Unis: A Simple Developer Experience
● Create a uni from a JSON schema in under 5 minutes - code-free!
● Use Lambdas for smart contracts - no learning Solidity
● Built-in ledger and database state with full replication, ACID semantics,
and cross-account / cross-cloud support - no DIY required
● Built-in web and mobile support using GraphQL - no framework clutter!
● SaaS deployment model - no installs, no maintenance
● 100% serverless implementation - scalable and fault tolerant by design
● ACID semantics, full support for blobs - no need to compromise for
multimedia and large data files
● Seamless integration with Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, AWS Lambda,
Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, Amazon EFS and more!
● Azure and Google support coming soon

46. What can you build with Unis?
● Stateful serverless apps with built-in NoSQL data storage and
“out of the box” support for GraphQL clients
● Virtual data lakes that span public clouds
● Multi-account, multi-region event routers
● High-speed, low-latency ledgers and private blockchains
● “APIs on steroids”: GraphQL-based APIs that automatically
maintain consistent data with no extra coding effort
● Multi-region webapps

47. The Future
1. Supercomputers are
serverless.
2. Infrastructure goes SaaS.
3. Serverless apps get their
state back, go multi cloud
stack
company
region
account

48. Thank You!
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