Episode #89: Serverless in a DevOps World with Sarjeel Yusuf

Serverless Chats

About Sarjeel Yusuf

Engineer turned product manager, Sarjeel Yusuf is greatly interested in how the move to cloud computing and the rise of DevOps is revolutionizing the way we manage and release our software systems. Ex Thundra, and currently at Atlassian, Sarjeel is focused on bringing DevOps enabling solutions from the perspective of incident investigation and resolution in Opsgenie. By leveraging his past experience in Serverless monitoring and debugging at Thundra, he believes that there is a great opportunity in how serverless can unlock the potential of DevOps teams.

In his free time, Sarjeel loves to write about new advancements in the fields of serverless, DevOps, and more recently, product management strategies. His writings can be found on his personal medium account as well as other publications. He would love to get in touch with anyone who would love to brainstorm ideas in pushing existing technologies to build amazing products.

• Twitter: @SarjeelY
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/syedsarj/
• Website: sarjeelyusuf.me
• Opsgenie: https://www.atlassian.com/software/opsgenie

Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/T7eUUUBRZQQ

This episode is sponsored by Epsagon.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Sarjeel Yusuf. Hey, Sarjeel, thanks for joining me.

Sarjeel: Hey, Jeremy, thank you so much for having me. I just want to say it's pretty exciting to be here. I've been watching the show for quite a while now, and it's just exciting to be here with you and talk about everything serverless, I guess.

Jeremy: I'm excited to have you here. So, just to introduce yourself. So, you are a product manager at Atlassian. So, I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Atlassian.

Sarjeel: Sure. So, yeah, as you've mentioned, I'm a product manager at Atlassian. Actually, a very new product manager. Just a year ago, I was a software developer within Atlassian, within Opsgenie, and now I'm a product manager at Opsgenie. So, I made the switch to product management very recently, actually.

And so, for those who don't know what Opsgenie is, Opsgenie is basically an on-call incident management tool. It allows you to route your alerts to the right person, make sure that everybody is aware of incidents that may occur. And it helps you all the way from incident awareness to incident investigation and retribution. And my specific role at Opsgenie is basically helping DevOps practicing teams to better their entire DevOps flow, especially considering incident management in the DevOps pipeline.

Jeremy: Right. So, that's actually what I want to talk to you about today, is just about DevOps. It's such an interesting discipline. And as teams sort of evolve and start using the cloud, it's almost like it's sort of necessary, I think, in order for you to adopt some sort of a DevOps culture.

And working at Atlassian, obviously, Atlassian has Jira, and Opsgenie, and all these other services that help with software development, and the software development lifecycle and things like that. But I think there's a major confusion out there about what exactly we mean by DevOps. And especially when you see companies labeling tools as like, "Hey, here's a DevOps tool." Or you've got DevOps engineers and things like that, that just seems really weird to me, because I don't think of DevOps that way. And maybe we could start there and sort of just set a baseline for the listeners here, and have you explain what exactly is DevOps, and what do we sort of mean by as a practice or as a culture as opposed to a set of tools or engineers?

Sarjeel: Yes. Yeah, that's it, right? DevOps right now, the reality that DevOps has ... The word DevOps has become a buzzword. Actually, quite interestingly, I think it was yesterday or a few days ago, I saw a tweet by Patrick Debois who was saying that just because ... It goes along the line of something like this. Just because an idea has become a buzzword doesn't mean that you should shy away from it. You should still go into it and explore what it is, and you learn from it.

That's the problem right now. The industry has been capitalizing on DevOps. Especially a lot of new startups are capitalizing on DevOps, marketing themselves as DevOps tool. So much so that the promise of DevOps is kind of lost or not fulfilled when you have all of these DevOps tools or DevOps engineers or DevOps certifications coming up in the industry.

Let's try to understand what exactly DevOps is. I think the best person who explains this or who captured this is Jez Humble. He basically describes DevOps as a set of practices, a cultural mindset, not exactly a set of tools. Yes, you can have tools to help with your DevOps practices. I'm not saying that, "Oh, any tool that says is associated with DevOps, that's definitely a lie." No, it's not like that.

So, you can have tools to help with your DevOps practices, your DevOps culture. Harboring that culture in your company or in your team. But at the end of the day, it comes down to how you and your team and your entire organization are going from the ideation phase all the way to the release to production and then maintaining of your product. For example, that's where we, at Opsgenie, operate incident management. How you maintain your product, and then how you learn from that and then go through that loop again.

So, traditionally, what we saw was that we had all these separate teams where you had different roles associated to a separate state in your development flow. For example, you had ideation. The first one would be ideation where you would see more involvement of product managers and designers and sometimes engineering managers. I'm just talking very generally. You would have build, you would have tests, release, monitoring, incident management, feedback. All of these were siloed.

And the problem became that when your product, when your software would go from one stage to another stage, when those involved in one stage would throw it over the wall to those involved in the next stage, the people receiving it in the next stage, there was some communication gap. And what that resulted in was that things just went slower, especially when you would scale your product, and especially when things would go wrong. That's what we see as an incident management tool.

Especially for our customers, when our customers are using Opsgenie and the responders are not necessarily the people who were responsible for building the code, it takes them longer to resolve the incident. That's expected. You are trying to resolve something that you didn't build, that you don't know the nitty gritty details about, and you're trying to find what went wrong. That's what DevOps aims to solve. So, I would say that with DevOps, what you can achieve is that you can go faster. You can increase your velocity while maintaining stability. That's the entire promise of DevOps.

Jeremy: Yeah. I like, basically, that quote of just because it's a buzzword doesn't mean you don't need it. And I feel like the same thing has happened with serverless as well, where everybody just starts slapping the term serverless on their product, or say we do something with serverless. I t...