Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and creator of Moore’s Law died this week aged 94 years. He was one of Intel’s co-founders. And became chairman and CEO of the company in 1979, and served as CEO for eight years.
While Moore obviously played a significant role in developing the tech that powers modern computing devices, many people will also be familiar with his name because of “Moore’s law’. And his 1965 Moore’s Law formula predicted that processors would roughly double in transistor count every year. A decade later (1975), he changed his estimate to be one doubling every two years. The law is still true, but experts have predicted that it may slow in the 2020s.
Moore’s Law: The number of transistors on microchips doubles every two years:
In 2015, when he was asked about Moore’s law, he responded by saying “once I made a successful prediction, I avoided making another,” according to a statement from The Gordon and Betty Moore foundation.
Serverless leverages Moore’s Law
While Moore’s law has been instrumental in driving advancements in computing power and cost, it is not directly related to serverless. However, serverless does leverage the benefits of Moore’s law by allowing developers to take advantage of the increasing computing power of the modern cloud and the cost savings that come with it.
At The Serverless Edge, we are fans of Moore’s law as it demonstrates that being on the edge of innovation means rapid advancement – the flywheel is always getting faster. The modern cloud is on a similar trajectory, maturing into its own powerhouse.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels articulates a very similar perspective by insisting that the “cloud” is not a technology, but a “way of doing things” that must be “defined by its benefits.” He lists four benefits that he sees as hallmarks of cloud computing:
- lower costs,
- increased agility,
- letting someone else do the heavy lifting,
- and the ability to build new architectures.
The tip of the spear
Phil Le-Brun echoes this sentiment at Serverlessdays Belfast. Phil is the Director of the Enterprise Strategy Team for AWS. He speaks a lot to C-Levels about the Cloud. So he has a unique perspective from speaking to the leaders of the industry.
He says that only 5-10% of workloads are in the cloud. And of those workloads, only a minority are serverless. We are at the tip of the spear of where things are going. And to embrace it and keep pushing.
Unlike Gordon Moore and Intel, the modern cloud is not just about making technology exponentially efficient. The Modern Cloud requires commitment and input from people to reach the exponential improvements of Moore’s law.
As software engineers, our job is not to write code but to help the business. Ben Kehoe, the previous lead researcher at iRobot, once said, “The point is not functions, managed services, operations, cost, code, or technology. The point is focus—that is the ‘why’ of serverless.”
Again, this bares repeating so let’s break that down:
- Functions are not the point.
- Managed services are not the point.
- NoOps is not the point.
- Cost is not the point.
- Code is not the point.
- Technology is not the point.
- Events are not the point.
- Architecture is not the point.
- Mapping is not the point.
- Data is not the point.
- Innovation is not the point.
- Even sustainability is not the point!
Serverless is a consequence of focusing on business value and offloading everything else (infrastructure and operations, for example). Serverless-first should be a reminder to “not sweat the small stuff”—focus on your business and delivering value to your customer instead.
The power of the cloud is at your fingertips. You have the skills, and you have the business problem. Do not tolerate any slowdown.