Essential Ingredients for Growing a Serverless Team
As you saw in Chapter 1, builders and stakeholders are one of the essential com‐ ponents of the serverless technology ecosystem. Builders (i.e., engineers) are the people who architect, build, and operate serverless applications. When we talk about growing an engineer in a serverless ecosystem, we can draw parallels with how a plant grows in our environmental ecosystem. Taking inspiration from nature, here are some of the essentials for growing a successful team of serverless engineers:
- A fertile field (a conducive environment)
- Healthy seeds (passionate pilot engineers)
- A gardener (a serverless enabler to guide the team)
- Water, sunlight, and nutrients (training and a knowledge base)
Let’s take a closer look at each of these key ingredients.
Conducive team environment
A healthy serverless ecosystem needs a favorable enterprise environment with a cul‐ ture that fosters growth in the fertile surroundings. As you saw earlier in this chapter, adopting serverless requires adequate space for experimentation and innovation.
As shown in Figure 2-14, the characteristics of a fertile environment include:
- Freedom to take risks to build self-belief among the engineers
- Encouragement to experiment with ideas to foster product inventions
- Teams’ involvement in technical and operational decision making to build trust and promote motivation
- Autonomy to self-govern, removing bureaucracy and allowing increased team velocity
- Nurturing an ownership culture to create a sense of belonging that encourages responsibility
- Sufficient learning opportunities to keep engineers in the know about advances in technology
Figure 2-14. Characteristics of a growth-promoting enterprise environment
You cannot readily source these traits from outside; they must be initiated by the leadership teams and radiated down to everyone in the organization.
Passionate pilot engineers
If your organization is starting fresh on serverless, you will unlikely have serverless specialists in-house. In such situations, it is beneficial to identify the best engineers with a forward-thinking mind and set them up as the torchbearers for serverless adoption. They will assume the role of pilot engineers and act as catalysts to spear‐ head the serverless revolution, inspiring others and laying the foundation for success.
In addition to solid software engineering skills, including architecture and security, pilot engineers should possess a positive attitude and willingness to take on chal‐ lenges and identify pathways to success (see Figure 2-15). They’ll work closely with the business stakeholders and product teams, guided by the serverless enabler (see the next section), to map your organization’s serverless journey.
Figure 2-15. Necessary skills of a pilot engineer to promote serverless adoption
