The Widening Gap Between Serverless and Kubernetes – InApps 2022

#167: The Widening Gap Between Serverless and Kubernetes

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The divide continues to grow between people developing serverless technologies and those in DevOps roles building, deploying, and managing Kubernetes. “Questions about serverless approaches and Kubernetes don’t really come up with developers,” said Timirah James, a developer advocate with Cloudinary on today’s episode of InApps Analysts podcast.

James joined TNS founder Alex Williams and analyst Klint Finley, a contributor at Wired, to discuss how organizations and developers both can help bridge this gap.

Detailing her experience at Notre Dame University in Belmont, California, James noted that, “If you’re pursuing education in this field and trying to go to college for it, if you’re trying to go to college for anything, you want to make sure you’re attending an institution that has a network, community, and foundation around what you’re studying. Especially something as niche as computer science.”

Citing cultural issues within the university and problems with the curriculum, James made the decision to leave the university in her freshman year. Through tools such as Coursera and Code Academy, she successfully taught herself mobile web development.

In her previous developer advocate roles at Platform9 and Verizon Digital, James started taking notice of software architectures, learning more about Kubernetes and serverless. “I’d been hearing serverless, containerization, and all these different buzzwords, but within the first month of being there, that was when I learned the most about it. What Kubernetes is, what serverless really even means, and I really got into it. I think that’s why this topic is so important as to this divide, and why the serverless community isn’t as well-versed, is because there’s a huge gap in-between. You take someone like me coming from a mobile background, coding all the time, we leave a lot of stuff to the back-end guys. I’m not a DevOps guy, I wasn’t a back end developer. There are several layers. There’s the code, there are microservices, there are several concepts to grasp here. It keeps going higher and higher up, and the learning curve becomes deeper. It takes a long time to get used to even containerization,” said James.

In This Edition:

4:32: Finley’s thoughts and perspectives about the way developers come up through the ranks using tools such as Coursera and Code Academy.
12:24: Exploring the connection between serverless and Kubernetes
20:21: The expectation of computer science in the past was based on concepts such as mainframes, .NET stacks, and things one had to worry about. People have not been historically trained to start thinking about DevOps. So with that in mind, what are some of the things people can do to start educating themselves on that side of the business.
26:04: How are serverless application environment becoming more complex, and what is that leading to team management and tools that are new and different from what you might ordinarily experience?
34:11: How communication is affecting the way that teams work together.
38:16: What is the graduation from ‘build, deploy, and manage,’ in terms of team management and career development?

Feature image via Pixabay.