Idea to Prototype to Production

Serverless for Product Managers, London Tech Week, June 13th, 2019

Transcript

1. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Danilo Poccia Principal Evangelist, Serverless @danilop Idea → Prototype → Production with Serverless
2. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent.” To our shareowners: The American Customer Satisfaction Index recently announced the results of its annual survey, and for the 8th year in a row customers ranked Amazon #1. The United Kingdom has a similar index, The U.K. Customer Satisfaction Index, put out by the Institute of Customer Service. For the 5th time in a row Amazon U.K. ranked #1 in that survey. Amazon was also just named the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies list, which ranks the most sought after places to work for professionals in the United States. And just a few weeks ago, Harris Poll released its annual Reputation Quotient, which surveys over 25,000 consumers on a broad range of topics from workplace environment to social responsibility to products and services, and for the 3rd year in a row Amazon ranked #1. Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence. And on behalf of Amazonians everywhere, I want to extend a huge thank you to customers. It’s incredibly energizing for us to see your responses to these surveys. One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it. How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it – it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it. We’ve had some successes over the years in our quest to meet the high expectations of customers. We’ve also had billions of dollars’ worth of failures along the way. With those experiences as backdrop, I’d like to share with you the essentials of what we’ve learned (so far) about high standards inside an organization. Intrinsic or Teachable? First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter. Universal or Domain Specific? Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more. I had to learn and develop high standards on all of that (my colleagues were my tutors). 2017 Letter to Shareholders
3. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. “Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied.” To our shareowners: The American Customer Satisfaction Index recently announced the results of its annual survey, and for the 8th year in a row customers ranked Amazon #1. The United Kingdom has a similar index, The U.K. Customer Satisfaction Index, put out by the Institute of Customer Service. For the 5th time in a row Amazon U.K. ranked #1 in that survey. Amazon was also just named the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies list, which ranks the most sought after places to work for professionals in the United States. And just a few weeks ago, Harris Poll released its annual Reputation Quotient, which surveys over 25,000 consumers on a broad range of topics from workplace environment to social responsibility to products and services, and for the 3rd year in a row Amazon ranked #1. Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence. And on behalf of Amazonians everywhere, I want to extend a huge thank you to customers. It’s incredibly energizing for us to see your responses to these surveys. One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it. How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it – it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it. We’ve had some successes over the years in our quest to meet the high expectations of customers. We’ve also had billions of dollars’ worth of failures along the way. With those experiences as backdrop, I’d like to share with you the essentials of what we’ve learned (so far) about high standards inside an organization. Intrinsic or Teachable? First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter. Universal or Domain Specific? Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more. I had to learn and develop high standards on all of that (my colleagues were my tutors). 2017 Letter to Shareholders
4. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. “People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s wow quickly becomes today’s ordinary.” To our shareowners: The American Customer Satisfaction Index recently announced the results of its annual survey, and for the 8th year in a row customers ranked Amazon #1. The United Kingdom has a similar index, The U.K. Customer Satisfaction Index, put out by the Institute of Customer Service. For the 5th time in a row Amazon U.K. ranked #1 in that survey. Amazon was also just named the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies list, which ranks the most sought after places to work for professionals in the United States. And just a few weeks ago, Harris Poll released its annual Reputation Quotient, which surveys over 25,000 consumers on a broad range of topics from workplace environment to social responsibility to products and services, and for the 3rd year in a row Amazon ranked #1. Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence. And on behalf of Amazonians everywhere, I want to extend a huge thank you to customers. It’s incredibly energizing for us to see your responses to these surveys. One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it. How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it – it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it. We’ve had some successes over the years in our quest to meet the high expectations of customers. We’ve also had billions of dollars’ worth of failures along the way. With those experiences as backdrop, I’d like to share with you the essentials of what we’ve learned (so far) about high standards inside an organization. Intrinsic or Teachable? First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter. Universal or Domain Specific? Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more. I had to learn and develop high standards on all of that (my colleagues were my tutors). 2017 Letter to Shareholders
6. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. “Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set. The focus is on simplicity and robustness.” – Amazon S3 Press Release, March 14, 2006
7. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” Gall’s Law
8. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. “A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
9. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Monolithic Application Services Microservices
10. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. What is serverless? No infrastructure to manage Automatic scaling Pay for value Highly available and secure
11. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. How does Serverless work? Storage Databases Analytics Machine Learning . . . Your business logic User uploads picture Customer data updated Anomaly detected . . . Fully-managed services Events Functions
12. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. How does this work? Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash
13. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Serverless Real-Time Apps – What to build? • Building a chat is the mandatory example for WebSockets • Can I build something that can help in being a “better” person? • Not in person communication is hard • Can machine learning help? Some services are super easy to use!
14. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Vision Speech Language Chatbots Forecasting Recommendations Forecast Comprehend Lex Personalize Polly Rekognition Image Video Textract Transcribe Translate
15. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Let’s build a “Positive Chat” J • Avoid negative sentiment • Reject negative sentences • Positive sentiment gamification • Automatically translate between different languages • Extract message topics to improve searchability and discoverability • Create and update a chat room “tag cloud” • Search or filter messages by “tag”
16. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Let’s build a “Positive Chat” J • Attach images to messages • Moderate content • Describe image content (objects, people, emotions) • Find text in images • Anonymize people faces • For all people or based on estimated age • Cover faces with emoticon based on actual emotions !"#$%
17. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Positive Chat – Serverless architecture Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Cognito Amazon API Gateway WebSocket connection PositiveChat Lambda function Connections table Conversations table Topics table Web browser AWS Cloud S3 bucket for static assets (HTML, CSS, JS) Authentication Authorization To be implemented Amazon Comprehend Amazon Translate Amazon Rekognition To be implemented
18. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. $ wc -l positive-chat/app.js 326 positive-chat/app.js $ wc -l www/index.js 204 www/index.js backend + frontend ≃ 460 lines of code removing empty lines and comments
19. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Positive Chat Demo https://pchat.demo.danilop.net/?room=LondonTechWeek https://github.com/danilop/serverless-positive-chat
20. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. What is in for Product Managers? Less code, more speed Focus on what you want to build Estimate the cost per user or per feature Link business models and tiers to features and costs Faster to turn an idea into a prototype Prototypes are easier to bring in production Service updates enable new features
21. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
22. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. What about teams? Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash
23. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. You Build It, You Run It “This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to- day contact with the customer.” – Werner Vogels CTO, Amazon.com
24. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Team size & communication paths = #(# − 1) 2 Communication paths in a team of N people
25. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Two pizza teams Photo by Kristina Bratko on Unsplash
26. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Separable vs complex tasks Separable task Complex task
27. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Ability as a collection of cognitive tools Adam Abilities = 5 { A, B, C, D, E } For example: A – mobile development on iOS B – back end development in Java C – data analytics in Python D – complex SQL queries E – …
28. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Ability as a collection of cognitive tools Adam Carl Betsy { C, D, G } Abilities = 5 Abilities = 4 Abilities = 3 { A, B, E, F } { A, B, C, D, E }
29. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Diversity bonus model – Team with best abilities Adam Carl Betsy { C, D, G } Abilities = 5 Abilities = 4 Abilities = 3 Team Abilities = 6 { A, B, E, F } { A, B, C, D, E }
30. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Diversity bonus model – Team with more cognitive tools Adam Carl Betsy { A, B, E, F } { A, B, C, D, E } { C, D, G } Abilities = 5 Abilities = 4 Abilities = 3 Team Abilities = 7
31. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. No diversity, no bonus – Beware hiring managers Adam Carl Betsy { A, B, C, D } { A, B, C, D, E } { B, C, D } Abilities = 5 Abilities = 4 Abilities = 3
32. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Some cognitive tools must be learned in order Adam Carl Betsy { A, B, C, D } { A, B, C, D, E } { A, B, C } Abilities = 5 Abilities = 4 Abilities = 3
33. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. 2,092 people who worked on 474 musicals from 1945 to 1989 Small world networks & creativity AJS Volume 111 Number 2 (September 2005): 000–000 PROOF 1 ᭧ 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0002-9602/2005/11102-0003$10.00 Thursday Oct 13 2005 11:31 AM AJS v111n2 090090 VSJ Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem1 Brian Uzzi Northwestern University Jarrett Spiro Stanford University Small world networks have received disproportionate notice in di- verse fields because of their suspected effect on system dynamics. The authors analyzed the small world network of the creative artists who made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. Based on original arguments, new statistical methods, and tests of construct validity, they found that the varying “small world” properties of the systemic- level network of these artists affected their creativity in terms of the financial and artistic performance of the musicals they produced. The small world network effect was parabolic; performance in- creased up to a threshold after which point the positive effects reversed. Creativity aids problem solving, innovation, and aesthetics, yet our un- derstanding of it is still forming. We know that creativity is spurred when diverse ideas are united or when creative material in one domain inspires or forces fresh thinking in another. These structural preconditions suggest 1 Our thanks go out to Duncan Watts; Huggy Rao; Peter Murmann; Ron Burt; Matt Bothner; Frank Dobbin; Bruce Kogut; Lee Fleming; David Stark; John Padgett; Dan Diermeier; Stuart Oken; Jerry Davis; Woody Powell; workshop participants at the University of Chicago, University of California at Los Angeles, Harvard, Cornell, New York University, the Northwestern University Institute for Complex Organizations (NICO); and the excellent AJS reviewers, especially the reviewer who provided a remarkable 15, single-spaced pages of superb commentary. We particularly wish to thank Mark Newman for his advice and help in developing and interpreting the bipartite-affiliation network statistics. We also wish to give very special thanks to the Santa Fe Institute for creating a rich collaborative environment wherein these ideas first emerged, and to John Padgett, the organizer of the States and Markets group at the Santa Fe Institute. Direct correspondence to Brian Uzzi, Kellog School of Man- agement, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208. E-mail: Uzzi@northwestern.edu
34. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash What can we build?
35. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Capital One – Credit Offers API serverless architecture Affiliates www.capitalone.com/ credit-cards/prequalify AWS Cloud Capital One API Gateway VPC Lambda Function Traces Logs Production Support Command Center COAT Credit Offers API Team Lambda Function S3 Bucket TTL Third-Party API Case Study
36. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Capital One – Credit Offers API CI/CD pipeline Continuous Improvement, Continuous Delivery! GitHub LGTM Bot Jenkins AWS SAM S3 Bucket (Versioning) Lambda Function DeploymentType: dev: AllAtOnce qa: AllAtOnce qaw: AllAtOnce prod: Canary10Percent10Minutes prodw: Canary10Percent10Minutes canary5xxGetProductsAlarm: Type: AWS::CloudFormation::Alarm Properties: AlarmActions: - !FindInMap: - params - AdminSNSTopic - !Ref Environment AlarmDescription: 500 error from product listing Lambda. ComparisonOperator: GreatherThanOrEqualTothreshold Period: 300 Statistic: Sum Threshold: 1 EvaluationPeriod: 1 Case Study
37. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Capital One – Benefits from taking the API serverless Performance gains From the time the request is received by lambda to the time to send the response back 70% Cost savings By removing EC2, ELB and RDS from our solution 90% Increase in team velocity Reduce investment in team’s time on DevOps and dedicate back to feature development! 30% Case Study
38. SCALING CHALLENGES 350 DONATIONS PER SECOND Case Study
39. OLD VS NEW March 2019 cost* $5,393 March 2015 cost* $83,908 *All hosting costs are paid for through corporate partnerships. 100% of public donations go to the projects we fund. Case Study
40. WE COULD DO IT ALL AGAIN TOMORROW Serverless services cost $92 Case Study
41. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. 1. Write less code, be serverless 2. Experiment, measure, learn 3. Give teams ownership and autonomy 4. Minimize communication paths 5. Maximize different abilities 6. Mix new and existing relationships
42. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. Thank you! @danilop