Episode #107: Serverless Infrastructure as Code with Ben Kehoe

About Ben Kehoe
Ben Kehoe is a Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot and an AWS Serverless Hero. As a serverless practitioner, Ben focuses on enabling rapid, secure-by-design development of business value by using managed services and ephemeral compute (like FaaS). Ben also seeks to amplify voices from dev, ops, and security to help the community shape the evolution of serverless and event-driven designs.

Twitter: @ben11kehoe
Medium: ben11kehoe
GitHub: benkehoe
LinkedIn: ben11kehoe
iRobot: www.irobot.com

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/B0QChfAGvB0

This episode is sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.

Transcript
Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Marshburn.

Jeremy: And this is Serverless Chats. And this is a momentous occasion on Serverless Chats because we are welcoming in Rebecca Marshburn as an official co-host of Serverless Chats.

Rebecca: I'm pretty excited to be here. Thanks so much, Jeremy.

Jeremy: So for those of you that have been listening for hopefully a long time, and we've done over 100 episodes. And I don't know, Rebecca, do I look tired? I feel tired.

Rebecca: I've never seen you look tired.

Jeremy: Okay. Well, I feel tired because we've done a lot of these episodes and we've published a new episode every single week for the last 107 weeks, I think at this point. And so what we're going to do is with you coming on as a new co-host, we're going to take a break over the summer. We're going to revamp. We're going to do some work. We're going to put together some great content. And then we're going to come back on, I think it's August 30th with a new episode and a whole new show. Again, it's going to be about serverless, but what we're thinking is ... And, Rebecca, I would love to hear your thoughts on this as I come at things from a very technical angle, because I'm an overly technical person, but there's so much more to serverless. There's so many other sides to it that I think that bringing in more perspectives and really being able to interview these guests and have a different perspective I think is going to be really helpful. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Rebecca: Yeah. I love the tech side of things. I am not as deep in the technicalities of tech and I come at it I think from a way of loving the stories behind how people got there and perhaps who they worked with to get there, the ideas of collaboration and community because nothing happens in a vacuum and there's so much stuff happening and sharing knowledge and education and uplifting each other. And so I'm super excited to be here and super excited that one of the first episodes I get to work on with you is with Ben Kehoe because he's all about both the technicalities of tech, and also it's actually on his Twitter, a new compassionate tech values around humility, and inclusion, and cooperation, and learning, and being a mentor. So couldn't have a better guest to join you in the Serverless Chats community and being here for this.

Jeremy: I totally agree. And I am looking forward to this. I'm excited. I do want the listeners to know we are testing in production, right? So we haven't run any unit tests, no integration tests. I mean, this is straight test in production.

Rebecca: That's the best practice, right? Total best practice to test in production.

Jeremy: Best practice. Right. Exactly.

Rebecca: Straight to production, always test in production.

Jeremy: Push code to the cloud. Here we go.

Rebecca: Right away.

Jeremy: Right. So if it's a little bit choppy, we'd love your feedback though. The listeners can be our observability tool and give us some feedback and we can ... And hopefully continue to make the show better. So speaking of Ben Kehoe, for those of you who don't know Ben Kehoe, I'm going to let him introduce himself, but I have always been a big fan of his. He was very, very early in the serverless space. I read all his blogs very early on. He was an early AWS Serverless Hero. So joining us today is Ben Kehoe. He is a cloud robotics research scientist at iRobot, as I said, an AWS Serverless Hero. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben: Thanks for having me. And I'm excited to be a guinea pig for this new exciting format.

Rebecca: So many observability tools watching you be a guinea pig too. There's lots of layers to this.

Jeremy: Amazing. All right. So Ben, why don't you tell the listeners for those that don't know you a little bit about yourself and what you do with serverless?

Ben: Yeah. So I mean, as with all software, software is people, right? It's like Soylent Green. And so I'm really excited for this format being about the greater things that technology really involves in how we create it and set it up. And serverless is about removing the things that don't matter so that you can focus on the things that do matter.

Jeremy: Right.

Ben: So I've been interested in that since I learned about it. And at the time saw that I could build things without running servers, without needing to deal with the scaling of stuff. I've been working on that at iRobot for over five years now. As you said early on in serverless at the first serverless con organized by A Cloud Guru, now plural sites.

Jeremy: Right.

Ben: And yeah. And it's been really exciting to see it grow into the large-scale community that it is today and all of the ways in which community are built like this podcast.

Jeremy: Right. Yeah. I love everything that you've done. I love the analogies you've used. I mean, you've always gone down this road of how do you explain serverless in a way to show really the adoption of it and how people can take that on. Serverless is a ladder. Some of these other things that you would ... I guess the analogies you use were always great and always helped me. And of course, I don't think we've ever really come to a good definition of serverless, but we're not talking about that today. But ...

Ben: There isn't one.

Jeremy: There isn't one, which is also a really good point. So yeah. So welcome to the show. And again, like I said, testing in production here. So, Rebecca, jump in when you have questions and we'll beat up Ben from both sides on this, but, really ...

Rebecca: We're going to have Ben from both sides.

Jeremy: There you go. We'll embrace him from both sides. There you go.

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: So one of the things though that, Ben, you have also been very outspoken on which I absolutely love, because I'm in very much closely aligned on this topic here. But is about infrastructure as code. And so let's start just quickly. I mean, I think a lot of people know or I think people working in the cloud know what infrastructure as code is, but I also think there's a lot of people who don't. So let's just take a quick second, explain what infrastructure as code is and...