That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
Gareth McCumskey on serverless-first, helpful services, and the backend of the Jamstack
Quick show notes Our Guest: Gareth McCumskey What he'd like for you to see: Serverless' Components feature His JAMstack Jams: JAMstack and Serverless help build things with low-code. Check to see if there's a solution out there for what you need to solve a problem. His Musical Jams: Jinjer - Pisces This week's sponsor: Auth0 This week, we've got Auth0 as a sponsor. While their prowess at authentication is important, they're also releasing a ton of new tutorials and courses on their YouTube channel, including a free course on building a full-stack Jamstack app with Next.js. Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:03 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask the time honored question, what is your jam in the Jamstack? I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we talk with Gareth McCumskey, a serverless architect at Serverless Inc. Before we dive into the episode, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor off zero, we'll talk a bit more about the amazing educational content they're putting out at the end of the episode. If you're curious about that, Jamstack and author education, head on over to a0.to/tmjyt. That's My Jamstack YouTube for all the videos. Hey, Gareth, thanks for joining us on the show today. Gareth McCumskey 0:45 Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I just, I love talking about Jamstack stuff. So it was a opportunity not to be missed. Bryan Robinson 0:51 Cool. Well, you like talking about Jamstack stuff. But tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? Gareth McCumskey 0:58 So my work right now is essentially I'm a Solutions Architect with Serverless, Inc, the creators of the Serverless framework. And yeah, being a small startup means that I kind of do a multitude of roles like most folks in the in the company. So I I'm involved a lot with helping users have the framework design and and sort of plan out the systems there. They they plan on building with service. And the other side of it is as well as I act as sort of developer advocate in trying to help spread the word about serverless. And related stuff, I guess you can say, Bryan Robinson 1:33 That's kind of growing the whole the whole world so that you know, people who want serverless might come to serverless in the future. Gareth McCumskey 1:40 Yeah, absolutely. And I find a lot of folks will hear some brief inkling about serverless, not quite sure what it means. And because you know, we've been able to produce enough content, they get a bit bit of understanding, and then they have questions. So it's nice to be there. So for that, for that growth period that a lot of devs go through. And I guess on my personal side, I'm, I think very much into the computer world. So especially with the with the load with the global pandemic we've been going through lately. So I'm quite an avid gamer. Yeah, and it's just that's kind of that way I love steam these days. Bryan Robinson 2:14 Nice. Are you? Are you on the PC side on the console side are like kind of in between? Gareth McCumskey 2:19 Well, PC side, which kind of means I never leave the desk. But yeah. Bryan Robinson 2:25 What's your what's your go to game right now, especially with with pandemic round? Gareth McCumskey 2:29 Well as a typical developer story, where I play a game called factorio. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's essentially an engineering style game where you build a factory and consume resources. And it's a massive problem solving things. So I go from working with developers all day long to basically running a little factory. Bryan Robinson 2:49 You know, from from software engineering to real engineering, in software. Gareth McCumskey 2:53 Yeah, something like that. Bryan Robinson 2:55 Nice. Alright, so so we're talking Jamstack today. So let's talk a little bit about what was your entry point into this world of Jamstack, or maybe static sites, I know you've been in the industry for a while? Gareth McCumskey 3:07 Well, it's one of those interesting situations I found myself in. And just a bit of context. So long story, here we go. I have had, I was a lead in a team at a tour company that basically sold all their product online. And with that, they had a platform that was built on WordPress that they've been using for about 10 years. So really showing its age really legacy when we're talking legacy. And when I joined, there were there were there being some serious issues with performance and science. So ultimately, we came to the point where we had to re architect pretty much the entire platform. But we needed a way to do things piecemeal as well, because we couldn't go down a rabbit hole for a year come out with something on the other side that maybe didn't fit, they need to start seeing some return on what we were working on. So initially, after spending a bunch of time looking at stuff, I found serverless, which was kind of my gateway into Jamstack side of things, and looking, looking at building, you know, the whole Functions as a Service became very attractive, especially when you're in a team of about two or three developers where none of you have massive DevOps experience. Myself, I can kind of spin up a web server when I need to keep it up to date. But you know, I wouldn't necessarily trust myself, you know, the massive production, cluster, and so on. So that became a little tricky first, and serverless seemed like the right answer for that. But serverless doesn't come without its own own way of doing things. And traditionally, for me, I had come from the world of big fat PHP frameworks that handled everything, you know, rendered rendered everything on server and push that out to the browser. So there's really going back to my roots when I was looking at serverless and realized that probably the best way to attack this would be to build back end API's with serverless and have a completely static front end running something like view or react or Whatever, and have that calling this API back, because the API back end is really where we were concerned about load the most. And this led us to start building a solution like this, where we could have a team focus on building a nice front end, and have a couple of guys building a front end. And myself, maybe, I think, was one of the engineers working on the back end, small team. And this works incredibly well, for us. We had an entire ci CD process, things were going really nice. And the first time I heard Jamstack, was about, I don't know, nine months into doing this, we attended a conference and somebody gave a talk about Jamstack. And the four of us sat in this talk looking at each other throughout this entire discussion going that's what we did. So it was very interesting way. And and I think one of the one of the key things that we talked about afterwards was how it was going back to our roots as as people building stuff for the web, seemed to be the best solution all along just building static HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and having API's to call to Bryan Robinson 6:03 Yeah, so an interesting thing that you kind of said, Kevin, in the beginning of this story, which is, I think, different from what a lot of people have said about their kind of intro into the Jamstack was, you actually started with this idea that we need serverless functions, we need Functions as a Service, whereas most people are saying, you know, hey, I am already using view or I'm already using react. So I got into this thing called Gatsby, I got into this thing called grid zone. And that was my entry point, or, you know, I like HTML. So I got into Jekyll or something along those lines. Where it said, where you're kind of saying, you know what, we don't want a monolith on the server, we want to break it up. And then oh, what are these other things we can do to attach it is that kind of a good representation of what you're what you were going there? Gareth McCumskey 6:50 Yeah, it was interesting, because there was some other things we were looking at sort of at the same time, I was really doing a big investigation into micro services as well, because this is back in 2016, as well, just to give it a little bit more context. So micro services was kind of new and coming out. And there's a few books written and it was growing in popularity. And when looking at microservices, the one thing that struck me instantly was how come out complex the infrastructure behind it looked. So microservices looks really complex for us to try and use. And we didn't feel confident in our skills, you know, in managing all this amount of infrastructure, as I mentioned, and servers just seemed a great answer for that. And very quickly, we realized that building a back end with something like serverless wasn't just about the Functions as a Service, because lambda was that new thing that I'd seen at AWS event which sort of struck struck me as well, and ultimately led me when I was investigating serverless, to realize that this was using lambda. But it's also all about the other services that you end up consuming as well, which you build upon. And that essentially replaces the need for this massive monolithic back end server. One of the things I point out to folks is that when you're building an application, there's really three, three main things that you need, you need some way to receive a request, some some HTTP endpoint, you need some way to compute, and you need some way to store data. That's ultimately and then of course, the fourth part, I guess, would be the response back, which would be the static pages that you're providing to user to, to consume. But ultimately, with an API, there's three components, we need to receive a request, you need to compute a response, and you just store data. And when you look at serverless, especially on the AWS side, which is what I'm most familiar with, you have AWS lambda, which kind of started a lot of this dynamodb, w
That's my JAMstack RSS Feed
