Episode #87: Building a Business Around Serverless with Nofar Asselman

Serverless Chats

About Nofar Asselman

Nofar Asselman is the Head of Business Development at Epsagon, where she initiated Epsagon’s partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and developed growth opportunities for the company. Nofar leads Epsagon’s business development department strategy, through revenue-generating channels and creating new alliances.

Nofar is a key figure at the AWS Partner Community and founded the first-ever AWS Partners Meetup Group. The group is focused on sharing joint AWS go-to-market strategies that successfully affect AWS Partners’ ecosystem and growth.

Nofar is passionate about her work with AWS cloud communities, organizes meetups regularly, and participates in conferences, events, and user groups. Nofar is a Founding Member of the Multi-Cloud Leadership Alliance (MCLA) and she loves sharing insights and best practices about her AWS experiences in blog posts on Medium.

• Twitter: @AsselmanNofar
• Medium: nofar-asselman.medium.com/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nofar-asselman-074b8134/
• Multi-Cloud Leadership Alliance (MCLA): https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13779838/
• Epsagon: https://epsagon.com/

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FL9XLtW57Ms

This week's episode is sponsored by Off-by-none, the weekly newsletter that focuses on the technical details of building modern applications in the cloud, driven by the serverless community. Visit us to subscribe, provide feedback, submit your articles, and nominate people who are contributing to the serverless community to become a Serverless Star.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm speaking with Nofar Asselman. Hey, Nofar, thanks for joining me.

Nofar: Hi, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you are the VP of Business Development at Epsagon, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about your background, what you do at Epsagon, and what Epsagon is all about?

Nofar: Yeah, absolutely. So actually I started in my past life, I was an attorney. I work in a big law firm, and this is where I understood that it's fun to work with startups from the legal side, but I wanted to move to the business side. And this is where I start my startup journey and today I work at Epsagon, where we help microservices customers to adopt microservices in confidence while providing them really seamless experience in monitoring their microservices architectures.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. So one thing that's really interesting about what Epsagon does is Epsagon has built a business around sort of the serverless ecosystem providing a solution for people who use serverless or are trying to build things with serverless. And I think that's really fascinating because serverless has become obviously quite a buzzword over the last few years. And a lot of people will stick the word "serverless" in their product title or in their description somehow. But what I would love to talk to you about is this idea of actually building a business sort of for serverless, right? So building something for the serverless ecosystem, whether that's a tool, whether that's some sort of a thing that makes it easier for you to monitor or build new things or whatever it is. But something that is for the serverless ecosystem. And so you have a ton of experience in this, so I'd love to get your perspective, but maybe we could start just sort of like what is the current state of the serverless market from a business perspective?

Nofar: Yeah, so I think that serverless is definitely growing. I'd say that it's not growing as fast as we thought it would grow, but I think we see more and more companies are leveraging serverless technologies to really achieve business agility and go to market faster. But I think if 2020 was a year where we did see an uptick in customers that are leveraging serverless, in 2021, we'll see that in a higher scale, just because I think that last year there were still some challenges around tooling and expertise that was still missing from lots of organizations. And there are so many great tools out there now that helping these customers to leverage their technology using serverless and really meeting market demands and meeting their customer's needs smoothly with serverless. So I think this year will be significant in terms of serverless growth.

Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And I think that is something that we've seen a lot of is there's been a lot of complaints that serverless is not easy to adopt as sort of a change in the mindset in terms of how you, again, maybe need new tooling, maybe we need new monitoring tools, maybe we need other solutions that help us do serverless. Certainly need education and training. So do you think, though, that with the growth of the serverless market that there are opportunities for tools and solutions and things like that?

Nofar: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I do think that building solutions around serverless is super important and if we're looking long-term, that's definitely the technology that will be the ground of many companies that will use serverless architectures. But I think today ... And that's what we did in Epsagon, so I'm not very objective, you can see what we've done in Epsagon, where we started to build the serverless solution, serverless monitoring solution and then we expanded the product to also include containers and microservices. Because in the end of the day, when customers are moving to microservices and to more modern applications they would most likely to use serverless, but I wouldn't count on that they're going to use 100% serverless. So you do want to provide them with seamless experience and solution that they can use as a one-stop-shop to their distributed applications.

Jeremy: Right. Yeah. No, and I think that that's a really good point because you haven't seen many shops that are like 100% serverless, right? There's a lot of this hybrid stuff that's going on. I mean, I've talked to several of them, whether it's Liberty Mutual, that's trying to go 100% serverless or LEGO who I think is 100% serverless at this point. And so if you're building tools to support the 100% serverless companies then are you sort of limiting your opportunities there? I mean, like you said with Epsagon shifting over to Kubernetes or expanding I should say to support that. There's been a few monitoring companies that have expanded in that direction as well, went from serverless as a start then they went into the broader container market. But then there are other services and solutions and tools that have stayed just focused on serverless. And then you've had a bunch of other monitoring solutions and other tools that were not serverless that have worked their way back to serverless. So I guess, is the market big enough for serverless-specific tools or do you really think you have to take that approach where you broaden and look at that hybrid market?

Nofar: Yeah, I think it's a great question because at the end of the day, if you're only doing serverless you're probably going to do it better than others. But if you're expanding so the market is larger than it used to be. So I do think that if you're expanding ...