Real-World Serverless: state of serverless adoption at Zoopla

, , , ,

Yan Cui

I help clients go faster for less using serverless technologies.

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.

 

Whenever you’re ready, here are 4 ways I can help you:

  1. If you want a one-stop shop to help you quickly level up your serverless skills, you should check out my Production-Ready Serverless workshop. Over 20 AWS Heroes & Community Builders have passed through this workshop, plus 1000+ students from the likes of AWS, LEGO, Booking, HBO and Siemens.
  2. If you want to learn how to test serverless applications without all the pain and hassle, you should check out my latest course, Testing Serverless Architectures.
  3. If you’re a manager or founder and want to help your team move faster and build better software, then check out my consulting services.
  4. If you just want to hang out, talk serverless, or ask for help, then you should join my FREE Community.