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**Carlisia Thompson:** Thank you. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So I think we have probably like 15-20 minutes left. One of the things we like to do with our guests is just kind of have like a fireside chat where we kind of talk about interesting kind of projects and news and other things that you have interest in. I know serverless is a big thing and we kind o... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Worst name ever. Ever. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I totally agree. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Is it worse than the Cloud? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[32:00\] Yes, it's far worse than the Cloud. At least with the Cloud you've got some concept that there's something somewhere. Serverless is just... Somebody should be shot for coming up with that, sorry. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yes, it's completely misleading. |
**Asim Aslam:** On the term - yeah, the term sucks a little bit. I think you have to look beyond the name and the hype and actually see what the real value is there, like what they're saying to you. And what they're really saying to you is, "Hey, this is the second coming of Platform as a Service where you don't have t... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Is there a shorter name for that? |
**Asim Aslam:** Serverless. \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** So I can totally get behind your description of it, but serverless just sounds so ridiculous. |
**Asim Aslam:** No... I guess the problem is you can't pick the naming, right? Once it takes off, it takes off. I mean you remember big data and you remember cloud and you remember DevOps and even microservices... It just happens and then it becomes the word and then there's nothing you can do. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** So, Asim, you seem to be very proficient with the concept of serverless. Why don't you tell everybody what it is? Because when we interviewed Travis Reeder, I had to actually go and look it up. I felt that I either wasn't getting it or I didn't see the big deal, because there is a server involved... |
**Asim Aslam:** Sure. So from what I gather, the idea is that it's really about event-driven programming and there is no management of servers or anything at all involved and you don't have to manage anything yourself. |
You basically write snippets of code which look like functions, and you set them up and you kind of configure them along with an API gateway, and the API gateway essentially triggers your function - or the colt of the API gateway triggers your function based on something that's happening there, and then your function e... |
The idea is you personally don't have to run anything. It's an automated system and it kind of switches the programming model a little bit, in the sense that you're focused on event-driven programming more so than anything else. And you can kind of imagine where this would work for analytics and consuming a certain typ... |
But people are also using it for other things. If you have side projects and you're running your Digital Ocean node or something like that and you're spending $20 a month on this, and you're only running a bunch of websites, they were showing kind of the cost breakdown and they're saying that you can reduce the cost, o... |
\[35:33\] Your container or whatever it is, your code is only executed when someone actually calls it. Otherwise there is nothing running in the interim, and that's really the big thing about it. There's nothing running, it only runs when something calls it. I'm not sure if I see it working at scale yet. I mean, within... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** So it sounds to me from what you are saying that I should be thinking about the serverless approach as microservices, but instead of a full-blown microservice, an API or an app, I have a function. With microservices, I would think how would I split my application into microservices, so now I have... |
**Asim Aslam:** Yeah. I think the goal is or the thing you should really think about is it's event-driven architectures. I think what they're saying is everything is asynchronous and so you're essentially building pipelines where things are triggered based on events. And the only synchronous action you may have is on t... |
Even for me personally, it's a shift in thinking in the way of building systems. I find that a lot of frontend engineers are very perceptive to this just because they come from a JavaScript world where it's event-driven programming. So I think for the rest of us we have a lot to learn, but I think the thing to take awa... |
I want to say that maybe 70% to 80% of frontend projects and data pipelines will be in this kind of model in the next five to six years, just because of the sheer value from it. But it's going to be a little while. Amazon have their own version of this, Google has their own version, IBM has their own version... So we n... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So do you see this as kind of a major shift in development, like most development would be done this way? Or do you see this more for almost rapid prototyping, people trying to get things going on from the business perspective, like you need to get this live? |
**Asim Aslam:** I think it's hard to say. I think initially it's prototyping. It's the way most new trends come about or new systems appear and it's the thing of like firstly use it for your side projects, and then when you're doing a new project at your company, you kind of use it then and then some other company sees... |
So we'll see some cases where people move their entire architectures over to it, and in other cases where it is primarily focused on frontend or the API or data analytics, and we'll have kind of a split off from other kind of ways of developing software. I can't actually say whether it will be the dominant form of how ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[40:01\] What do you know of products that are available to drive those serverless application developments for Go developers or developers in general? |
**Asim Aslam:** I think the first one that comes to mind is just serverless.com. That serverless project is the one that's been around the longest, it seems. It started out as a project called Jaws and now it's kind of taken off. It has over 8000 stars on GitHub. |
The other one is Apex, which seems to be doing really well and has multi-language support, along with Go. Even IBM open sourced their actual serverless project, it's called OpenWhisk, you can find it on GitHub. That will kind of give you a breakdown of how this stuff kind of works and you could even spin it up yourself... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Thank you. That's a great list, it seems. |
**Asim Aslam:** There's a lot of people moving on this very fast. There's a lot of big companies moving on it very fast. If you look at it, AWS has Lambda, Google has Functions, IBM has OpenWhisk, so you can see them all very, very quickly getting involved in this, because they see the value in it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think it's definitely something I want to keep my eye on. I have my reservations about it. I think there's ideas of it that I think are really cool and I think I have some open-ended questions just from kind of experience and how situations are handled in the event like the... You don't get the g... |
I think we are getting close to time, so one think I do want to touch on before we close out the show is the 1.7 Beta release. I'd like if we just have a couple of minutes to kind of just chat about some of the stuff that came as part of that and encourage people to download the beta and start compiling the code agains... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Let's do it! |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** One of the really interesting things I saw in there was the idea of subtests and sub-benchmarks, with the same setup and tear down for those testing packages. That's really nice because having to write that setup and tear down code over and over is annoying and being able to get that broken out is r... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. I think that's the hierarchical tests and the benchmark, so that way too. I think that's going be really cool. They did some performance improvements, mostly related to the strings and string conversion packages, crypto packages; the SSA I think is where most of it is coming along. |
I think they said that most of that stuff should workout, but if you see random errors in your code or things that don't work the way you'd expect them to with the compiler, there actually is a SSA=0 flag that you can pass under the compiler to get the old non-SSA backend and then submit an issue. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I was just going to say we forgot the most important piece of Go 1.7, which is the context package making it into standard live. I don't think there's any bigger news than that. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yes. Are you leveraging that, Asim, inside Micro, the context package? |
**Asim Aslam:** \[43:46\] Yeah, I am, actually. I think it's kind of become a staple among building services. At first, I didn't really understand it and then over time it started to make more and more sense. I think it makes a lot of sense that it's not part of the standard library. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. Well, Brian and I are both really excited about seeing that command, we've been using that for a while. And I have to admit, I haven't looked at this too deeply. I actually only saw it in the release notes. It looks like there's HTTP tracing associated with that context now, and I'm kind of i... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So I read up on that this morning. It's kind of interesting, because it allows you to attach functions to events in an HTTP client. So if you were making a client request out to a site, you can have a function get fired when DNS is resolved, for example, and that allows you to do some really nice de... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So this is more callback style? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Correct. I don't use the callback. We're Go programmers, so it's all events that you can tap into. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think you're tainted from your dislike of Node. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Oh my God, don't get me started. This is a family show, Erik. \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Brian got really mad at me one time because - what was it, like a JSON Lint, or something that I had installed as a command line tool, and it came with Node. And he's like, "Are you serious? You're fired. You're fired. You made me put Node.js on my computer?" \[laughter\] |
**Asim Aslam:** I tentatively somewhat agree with Brian just a little bit from the use of it, but maybe it's a necessary evil. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I haven't bought into it from a development perspective. I know people have their reasons for liking it, and I've always tried to be receptive to... You know, everybody uses what they feel comfortable with, so I try not to hate. But it's definitely not a platform or framework that I've used m... |
So anything else anybody wants to talk about before me close out the show? Because I think we are getting pretty close on time. Also Asim, if there's anything else that you would like to close with about Micro or serverless before we kind of wrap up the show? |
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