 From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE on the ground at Serverless Comp, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with theCUBE at Serverless Comp in New York City, really excited to have on the program. One of the keynote speakers and a first time guest on theCUBE, but someone I've known through the interwebs and have read his stuff for many years. Simon Wardley, who's a researcher with a leading edge for him. Simon, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you ever so much for inviting me. It's a delight to be here. All right, so my understanding is thanks to this event, you have reached a lifelong career goal. You're now a Sith Lord. Well, somebody basically took a quote of mine and put it on a Star Wars poster with the Empire at the bottom. So yes, it is absolutely. There you are. I am a Sith Lord, so delightful. And the quote was that Serverless will just fundamentally change the architecture of how we build things, something along those lines, I believe. Absolutely, yes. All right, so let's start there. Okay. There's so many, come on. We all got really excited when containers came out. We're going to talk to John Willis. You did. We're going to talk about Unicernals. The industry as a whole, there's frothy niths and buzz. Okay. So Serverless, how's it different? How's it the same? Why is it so important from your standpoint? Okay, so really good question. So to explain that question, we have to start off with a subject which is dear to my heart, which is mapping. So when we look at the value chain of any organization, the components in that value chain are evolving and they evolve from the Genesis, the novel and new to custom-built examples and then eventually products and rental services and then commodity and utility services. And that process is driven by supply and demand competition. It happens not only to activities, but to practice and data, but we give them different terms. They have all the same characteristics as when they evolve. Now, when you look at that involving environment, what you discover is there are two basic forms of disruption. There is the highly unpredictable form, which either occurs due to the appearance of something novel and new, which we don't know what it's going to impact or to product substitution. So that's the Nokia versus Apple sort of battle. You don't know which way it's going to go until after the battle. And there is a second form of disruption which is much more anticipatable or predictable. And that is the product to utility change. So we know that when things evolve from product to utility, we're going to see a rapid period of change and known as a punctuated equilibrium, explosion of higher order systems. We're going to see co-evolution of practice, disruption of past companies stuck behind inertia barriers. Yes, it's going to be about efficiency. No, we're not going to save any money because we're just going to do more stuff with it. And we're going to have all these new things as well. And we can anticipate that in advance. So when you start looking at value chains of organization, it's always the shift from product to commodity and utility which makes the big transformation in industry. And so one of them was compute, shifting from product as in servers to utility as in cloud. Unfortunately, dreadful term cloud, awful word. You know, it's not a wispy sort of thing up in the, and the sky, it is something very specific, the shift from compute to utility. Would you put virtualization along that continuum? Okay, so virtualization was one of the underlying components which actually helped with that happen. And so you also got the explosion of practices around that co-evolution of practice, things like DevOps. Well, the same transition is now happening in the platform space. So we're moving away from a product stack, things like lamp and dot net, to much more utility based code execution environments. And that's what we're getting with Lambda. And we're going to see an explosion of new things built on top, inertia barriers, companies stuck behind, they're die off. It'll be a rapid change punctuated equilibrium. You'll get all sorts of new things built. So we're going through that big transformation. Now these transformations have been going on for about 300 years. Some of them impact micro scale, economic sum macro, the biggest we call ages. And that all depends upon how widespread that component is in other value chains. So when we're talking about software, we're talking about a component which is in almost all other value chains. It's shifting from product to utility, massive change, highly predictable. This is what serverless is about. So will it change everything? Absolutely it will. All right, so Simon, I'm wondering if you've mapped out, for serverless, where's the land of economic expectation, the land of happiness and the land of despair? Okay, happiness, despair, and expectation. Yes. Okay, interesting one. So the land of despair will be getting stuck behind the inertia barriers, dismissing it, saying it's not going to impact, it's not going to impact, no, no. Because it's a punctuated equilibrium, it'll surprise you because it's an exponential growth. So you'll think you've got loads and loads of time and 10 years from now, you'll likely be panicking. Oh my gosh, it's impacting. I can't get the skills for people to help me do the transformation. My entire industry and business model is starting to disappear. So that is the land of despair that's coming to people that's easy to defend against because most people can't see the environment, they're going to just walk straight into that one. The land of happiness will obviously, other than being the utility providers who will be extremely happy about the growth of their industry, another area of happiness will be some of the novel and new things built on top. So we're bound to see the sort of one person, two person company who builds a function which is sold through something like the marketplace and everybody uses and they sell it for a billion. So we'll get the two person billion dollar company and I'm sure that will make them delightfully happy. So that's despair, happiness, also inflated expectations. So one of the big lies will be all serverless is going to save me money in terms of reducing my IT budget. I'm afraid not. This is Jevons Paradox, this has been going on since 1865. All that's going to happen is yes, it becomes more efficient, but we'll do more stuff because we're in competition. So we'll spend exactly the same as we've always done, but just doing vastly more. But nonetheless, loads of consultants will write reports about how it will save you money and then lots of people will be disappointed. I want to poke at that for a second. I don't disagree with Jevons Paradox when it comes to power, but example, say our host for this event, A Cloud Guru, their price to deliver per user is way lower than if they had done this the traditional way. And I heard many examples here at the show already where they said, oh, if I had built it this way, it's now in order of magnitude less dollars. So let's forget order of magnitude. Let's go many orders of magnitude. So from now to say the 1980s for $1,000, I can get a million times more compute resource than I could back then. Has my IT budget reduced a million fold during that time? And the answer is? Yeah. Well, my IT budget has reduced a million fold. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all. Because we just ended up doing vastly more stuff. So the point is, yes. Yeah, budgets are always flat, yes. So the point is, yes, we will be able to do the same things, but more efficiently, but the IT budget doesn't reduce because we end up doing more things. So we're in competition, say, you and me, and say you evolve, use these environments. You don't reduce your IT spending. You do more things. I'm now having to spend more and more just to try and keep up with you. So eventually I'm forced to adopt to that new world. So what happens is the individual acts become more efficient, but because we do more, we don't save anything. Yeah, I want to look at kind of maps versus strategy. I guess one of the things, if I, you know, if I'm talking to the typical, you know, enterprise CIO, or, you know, board and they say, oh, well, you know, a year ago I heard about serverless or today I heard about serverless, you know, the strategy is going to change greatly because this is, you know, changing so rapidly. How do you help companies kind of understand, you know, when things are changing so fast, how do I set a strategy for today? How long do I keep it? How long do I re, how often do I revisit it? So if you map an environment, like all maps, they're dynamic. So you're constantly adapting and changing them as the environment is changing. So when you look at, you know, you have the purpose of your company, you have the landscape you're operating in. There are a number of climatic patterns, about 30 of them, which impact that environment will change it, so you need to understand those. Then there's sort of universally useful patterns known as doctor and then there's gameplay. Now for most organizations, because they cannot see the environment, they cannot distinguish or may just be completely oblivious to any of this. So when they were talking about change, if I look at how things evolve from Genesis custom-built product commodity, most organizations will go Genesis, that's an innovation. Every custom-built feature differentiation of a product is an innovation. Every shift from product to utility is an innovation. So all they see is innovation, innovation, innovation. And therefore, you know, it's very easy to get sucked into one-size-fits-all methods work, one-size innovation programs, where in fact the Genesis, you would be using something like a lightweight XP, the product development much more lean, enterprise, a Scrum and MVP, and the utility is much more outsourcing or Six Sigma. So you should be using multiple techniques and multiple methods, and most organizations aren't in that position. And if they're not in that position of being able to see the environment, it's difficult to see where to attack, it's difficult to understand why here over there, it's difficult to manipulate the market. So what happens is most organizations work on Gupfill, whatever's popular in HBR, and just act. And you can call that strategy if you wish. All right, so I wish we could talk for another couple of hours, but I want to give you the final takeaway. Serverless today, how should people be thinking about it, and what should they be looking for over kind of the next six to 12 months in this space? So the key thing about serverless is we're seeing a shift from platform, from product to utility. So you should be developing skills in that space. And we're seeing co-evolution of practice. By that we mean there's a new set of practices combining finance and development together. What those practices are, we don't know yet. You have to experiment and explore. That's why attending events and being involved in building stuff will help you discover those practices. So today if you're a company, what depends on your position. So if you're a company which is behind the game, you say you haven't gone into infrastructure as a service, you're not doing DevOps, your own people are resistant to this change because though the vendors say you're going to lose their jobs and blah, then rather than embarking on a five to seven year program because that's how long it will take to do that, you should move up the stack and start with serverless and learning those practices because no one knows them well. And so you can take your people who've got inertia and retrain in that space, overcoming that inertia and give yourself a path forward. So it depends on your position, but I think most companies should be experimenting in this space. All right, well Simon Wardley, it's a pleasure to catch up with you today. Delight. I hope to have you back on theCUBE at another event soon. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.