Real-World Serverless: state of serverless adoption at Zoopla

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Yan Cui

I help clients go faster for less using serverless technologies.

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In the first-ever episode of Real-World Serverless, I spoke with Ricardo Espirito Santo about the state of serverless adoption at Zoopla – how they’re using serverless, their experience with it so far, and the challenges they have faced.

Zoopla is a UK company in the real estate industry. They were founded in 2008 and their platform allows you to rent, buy and sell properties. At the moment, they are using a mix of both Lambda and Fargate in their stack. Their adoption of serverless is relatively recent, and they have taken a very pragmatic approach. Teams make decisions on whether to use Lambda or Fargate based on the return-on-investment of the decision – i.e. how quickly they’re able to turn around the feature vs. the scalability and reliability benefits they get from Lambda.

We also spoke at length about being cloud-agnostic and multi-cloud. Which is a bit of a trigger for me… looking back, I probably spent more time talking (or ranting..) than I should have. Sorry!

Despite my lack of self-control, I feel we got some valuable insights into how a decent sized engineering team is gradually adding more and more serverless technologies into their stack and some of the pain points they experience. For example, AWS docs are not great, and the design for some of their APIs feel half-assed and lacks certain ergonomics.

Listen to the full episode below, and you can access the transcript here.

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