This Book Is For…
Executives in Business and Technology
I have written this book for both business-minded technologists and technology-minded businesspeople. Increasingly, if you are a businessperson, you must be technology minded because, as is often quoted, “software is eating the world.”[10] More companies are increasingly becoming software companies. Whether you are a business-minded technologist or a technology-minded businessperson, this book teaches you how to build and deploy software better, faster, cheaper, and more effectively than most companies in the world.
If you are a senior business leader, this book helps you bring technological change into your organization by showing you how a Serverless approach drives better business outcomes. If you are a technical team lead, this book helps you think like an executive leader and focus more on delivering value than optimizing for tech, to set you apart from your peers. You will increase your focus on what matters to your organization, release new features and functionality more quickly, and spend less money, time, and effort doing it. You will learn how to do all this while also learning how to mitigate the risks that are inherent when you rely on third parties to be successful.
Enterprises
I have run technology at companies of all sizes, and Serverless is just as beneficial for enterprises as brand-new startups. Enterprises will likely get the most benefit of adopting a Serverless mindset over their similarly sized competitors than startups because most enterprises suffer from more technical debt and an internal discontent with software development velocity. The journey within an enterprise to build fully Serverless applications is a long one that involves as much cultural as technical transformation. Part III of this book, “Getting to Serverless,” focuses on the key steps to drive Serverless adoption within an enterprise.
Startups and Smaller Businesses
Serverless is a game changer for startups and smaller businesses because it enables them to run lean budgets and use small numbers of developers to deliver software and services that look like they come from teams orders of magnitude larger. Branch, which I founded (and which is discussed in more detail in Part II, “Real-World Serverless”), has operated with approximately 1/30th (that is, around 97% less) the developer payroll of an insurance startup that launched fewer products in fewer states than Branch. Part III is mainly targeted at larger and more established organizations, but it is also useful for startups because the cultural and technical transitions are much the same.