The Serverless Edge

💡 Welcome to The Serverless Edge We help engineers, leaders, and organisations unlock business value through serverless-first thinking and modern cloud strategy. The ideas behind our work come from The Value Flywheel Effect — a framework for connecting technology, culture, and strategic value. 🔍 Whether you’re scaling an engineering team, modernising your cloud platforms, or building a culture of continuous improvement — we share the practical tools and principles to make it happen. 🎧 Tune into our Serverless Craic podcast and conference talks to explore real-world stories of transformation. 🚀 If you’re ready to apply The Value Flywheel Effect in your organisation, our consulting and advisory sessions can help you build resilient systems, align teams, and accelerate value delivery. 🔗 Learn more: theserverlessedge.com #ModernCloud #TheValueFlywheelEffect #TechLeadership #EngineeringExcellence

Big thanks as always to @jeremy_daly who features our latest Serverless CrAIc episode in the always brilliant 'Off by None' newsletter - and as you can see the emphasis is on AI! Here is Jeremy's blurb: "The Serverless Craic team covers the North Star framework, the difference between leading and lagging metrics, and how AI tools are removing friction from development cycles. They discuss the increasingly popular opinion of why product-oriented engineering practices matter even more when you can ship features in hours instead of months." Subscribe to the newsletter here: offbynone.io/issues/357/

☘️ Happy St. Patrick’s Day from all of us at The Serverless Edge! We like to think we put the AI into CrAIc! Where cutting-edge tech meets great conversation, bold ideas, and a bit of Irish charm. Sláinte! 🍻

AI didn’t remove the hardest problem in software. It made it worse. Knowing what to build. If your team doesn’t have a clear North Star, AI will just help you build the wrong things faster. New article 👇 theserverlessedge.com/ai-software-de… #AI #SoftwareEngineering #ProductEngineering

“If AI lets us build software faster… the real risk is building the wrong thing faster.” That’s the uncomfortable truth of the AI era. AI tools are removing friction from software development at an incredible pace. We can prototype faster. Ship features faster. Experiment faster. But speed doesn’t solve the hardest problem in software. Clarity does. Before writing a line of code — or prompting an AI agent — teams still need to answer one critical question: 👉 What problem are we actually solving? Without that clarity, AI doesn’t create value. It just accelerates waste. The teams that win in the AI era won’t be the ones with the most tools. They’ll be the ones with: • a clear North Star • strong product thinking • good observability and feedback loops • engineers who understand systems, not just code AI increases velocity. But direction still determines whether you arrive anywhere useful. Full discussion on the latest Serverless CrAIc episode 👇 youtube.com/watch?v=ATdBck… #AI #SoftwareEngineering #ProductEngineering #TechLeadership #GenAI #Serverless

We may have accidentally created a new team member at The Serverless Edge. He’s a laid-back tech guy. Irish accent… although it sounds like he’s spent a few too many years in the US conference circuit. Somewhere between: 🇮🇪 Dublin 🇺🇸 San Francisco ☁️ AWS re:Invent hallway track His job? Explain the SCORP™ Process Cycle without making platform engineering sound like a compliance document. So instead of: “Adopt structured platform maturity frameworks for operational excellence…” You get something more like: “Right… so if your platform team’s firefighting every week, SCORP helps you sort that out.” The real question is: Is he actually making SCORP™ engaging? Watch and decide for yourself 👇 More info on SCORP™ here: theserverlessedge.com/scorp-process-… If nothing else, we’ve learned something important: Every architecture framework improves with a bit of Irish commentary. 😄

Behind every article, podcast and architecture deep dive is a team of practitioners building this stuff for real. We’re engineers, architects and tech leaders who: • Design event-driven systems in production • Lead cloud and platform transformations • Tackle FinOps, governance and reliability challenges • Build internal developer platforms • Scale teams — not just workloads The Serverless Edge exists to cut through noise and share what actually works in modern cloud engineering. No theory for theory’s sake. Just real-world lessons from the front line. If you’re building distributed systems or leading cloud-native change — you’re in the right place. 👉 Meet the team: theserverlessedge.com/meet-the-team-… #Serverless #CloudArchitecture #PlatformEngineering #AWS #TechLeadership

Modernisation isn’t if — it’s when. In this Prodacity talk, David Anderson breaks down the Value Flywheel Effect, serverless-first mindset (rent → buy → build), and why technical leaders need a strategy map. 🎥 Watch this + all our talks & pods: youtube.com/watch?v=Jieg7_… #serverless #cloud #devops #platformengineering

AI is not your differentiator. The model providers are collapsing entire categories by the month. If your strategy is “LLM + prompts”, you’re building on someone else’s roadmap. The real advantage? Clarity. • Know what’s commodity • Know what’s differentiator • Tighten your feedback loops • Contain your blast radius AI is an accelerant. It amplifies whatever structure already exists. If your flywheel isn’t turning, AI won’t save you. We unpack this in more detail here 👇 theserverlessedge.com/ai-commodity-v… #AI #CTO #SoftwareArchitecture #EngineeringLeadership #ProductStrategy

Big thanks to Jeremy Daly and the OffbyNone Newsletter for giving us a shout out on last weeks pod: "Great discussion from Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O'Reilly on why engineering skills remain critical in the AI era. I totally agree that AI tools might actually increase demand for engineers rather than replace us, especially when you factor in domain expertise and quality standards." Check out Jeremy's newsletter and why not subscribe and stay up to date: offbynone.io/issues/352/

“You can’t outsource your critical thinking.” AI is accelerating everything. Your SDLC. Your feature delivery. Your experimentation cycles. Your internal tooling. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: If you don’t understand your value chain, your North Star, and your actual differentiator, AI will just help you go faster in the wrong direction. We’re seeing organisations: • Rebuilding capabilities that are already commodities • Injecting agentic AI into environments with no blast radius control • “Vibe coding” systems that underpin payroll and compliance • Shipping faster — but without tighter feedback loops AI is not the strategy. It’s an accelerant. And accelerants amplify whatever structure already exists — good or bad. The organisations that win won’t be the ones building LLMs. They’ll be the ones who: ✅ Map their landscape ✅ Know what’s commodity vs differentiator ✅ Tighten their feedback loops ✅ Contain risk properly ✅ Use AI to sharpen thinking — not replace it Turn your flywheel first. Then accelerate it. If you're leading engineering or product right now, the real question isn’t “Which AI tool?” It’s: Do we actually understand what creates value in our system? youtube.com/watch?v=do9nYW… #AI #SoftwareArchitecture #CTO #EngineeringLeadership #ValueFlywheel #WardleyMapping #ProductStrategy

“AI is going to kill software engineering.” That claim keeps coming up in meetings, Slack threads, and conference talks. It’s also wrong. In our latest article, we break down six AI myths that are quietly doing more damage than the technology itself — from “the quality isn’t good enough” to “we’ll need fewer engineers.” The uncomfortable truth? AI doesn’t replace engineering. It exposes weak engineering. Quality, context, domain knowledge, security, operability — none of that disappears just because a model can generate code. If anything, this is shaping up to be the most demanding era we’ve ever seen for: -software engineers -architects -CTOs and tech leaders 👉 The blog digs into what actually changes — and what absolutely doesn’t. theserverlessedge.com/ai-and-the-fut… 📖 AI and the Future of Software Engineering Curious to hear from others: Which AI myth do you see causing the most confusion right now? #SoftwareEngineering #AI #GenAI #EngineeringLeadership #TechLeadership #SustainableSystems #TheServerlessEdge

“These tools today are the worst that they will ever be.” That line stopped us in our tracks. There’s a lot of noise right now about AI: -Software engineering is dead -Your skills will be irrelevant -The quality isn’t good enough -We’ll need fewer engineers Most of it is lazy thinking. In our latest Serverless Craic discussion, we talked through six AI myths from a software engineering perspective — and one thing is clear: -AI doesn’t remove the need for engineering. It raises the bar. -Quality still matters. -Context still matters. -Domain knowledge still matters. -Security, operability, cost, and ownership still matter. AI is just another abstraction layer — and abstractions don’t eliminate responsibility. If anything, this is shaping up to be: 👉 one of the most demanding eras to be a good software engineer 👉 and one of the most rewarding, if you care about building things that last 🎥 Full discussion now live on YouTube. Would love to hear: which AI myth do you see causing the most damage right now? youtube.com/watch?v=uDmIvm… #SoftwareEngineering #AI #GenAI #Serverless #EngineeringLeadership #TechLeadership #SustainableSystems #TheServerlessEdge

A huge thank you to Christophe Beaucé @chrphb for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and insightful review of The Value Flywheel Effect. Christophe didn’t just skim the surface — he mapped the book. Chapter by chapter. From CEO clarity, to engineering as a socio-technical system, to serverless-first strategy, Wardley Mapping, developer experience, and long-term sustainability. What really stands out is this reflection: “Serverless is a mindset: aligning business needs with technology, with a laser focus on time-to-value. And this focus generates the momentum that grows our business.” Reviews like this matter because they show the book being used as intended: -as a thinking tool, not a technology manual -as a way to connect user needs to architecture decisions -as a framework leaders can return to again and again Christophe, thank you for your review — and for reinforcing that serverless was never about Lambda. It was always about momentum, alignment, and value. If you haven’t read Christophe’s full review yet, it’s well worth your time 👇 christophebeauce.com/posts/2023-12-…

“Developer productivity” wasn’t acceptable in the 1980s. So why are we still talking about it? Measuring engineers by output is a factory mindset. Lines of code. Commits. Activity charts. We tried this 40 years ago. It failed then. It fails now. Modern software isn’t stacking boxes. It’s problem-solving in complex systems: • unclear requirements • evolving architectures • socio-technical constraints • business outcomes that matter Your best engineers aren’t productive because they type faster. They’re productive because they: write less code reuse platforms instead of reinventing slow down to think optimise for outcomes, not activity If code commits suddenly “go through the roof”, that’s not a win. It’s usually a smell. AI dev tools don’t change this truth. They accelerate thinking engineers and amplify poor ones. The real question isn’t: 👉 “How productive are our developers?” It’s: 👉 “Do our teams understand the business problem, the KPI, and the outcome?” Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. And code is still a liability. If this resonates, the full article goes much deeper 👇 open.substack.com/pub/theservele…

“What should a modern CTO actually do?” It’s no longer about picking the right cloud. It’s about making decisions that still hold up 5–10 years from now. Today’s CTO is balancing: Platform bets that shape long-term business value Continuous cloud evolution (there is no “done”) Compliance, sustainability, and shared responsibility Empowering teams without creating chaos The hardest part? Knowing when to standardise and when to innovate. ✔️ Thin platforms over heavy abstractions ✔️ Guardrails instead of mandates ✔️ Serverless and containers — context matters ✔️ Standards beat “build your own” 99% of the time ✔️ Carbon impact is becoming as real as technical debt Modern cloud leadership isn’t about control. It’s about creating the conditions for sustainable speed. If you’re a CTO (or work closely with one), this edition is for you. 👉 What decision do you think CTOs underestimate the most today? linkedin.com/pulse/what-sho…

“You no longer own this.” The moment scale becomes possible. We’re now seeing the emergence of AI-native SDLCs, agent orchestration frameworks, and new models of delivery that would have felt speculative in 2021. But the underlying questions remain the same: How do we respond to opportunity faster? How do we manage risk without paralysis? How do we create long-term value, not short-term output? theserverlessedge.com/value-flywheel… #valueflywheeleffect #5yearson

“You no longer own this.” That single line changed how we think about building software. “You no longer own this. This is now a piece of work that we’re all working on.” Five years after writing The Value Flywheel Effect, it still holds true. Great systems (and books): Aren’t owned by individuals Improve through challenge Scale through shared understanding In Ep. 79 of Serverless Crack, we reflect on writing the book—and why these principles matter even more in the age of AI. youtube.com/watch?v=HRTLoT… If you want impact at scale, you have to let go of ownership. 💬 What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to let go of to scale?

Serverless isn’t easier. It’s better. In 2017, with just 4 engineers and enterprise expectations, Workgrid went serverless-first — not for hype, but for speed, focus, and value. No infra theatre. Just managed services and pragmatic architecture. Even Werner Vogels took notice. Read the case study 👇 medium.com/the-serverless…

🎄 Season’s greetings from The Serverless Edge 🎄 As 2025 comes to a close, we want to say thank you to our community. Looking ahead to 2026, we’re focusing on something deliberately simple: better habits, not bigger frameworks. Our atomic habit for the year ahead? The SCORP™ Process Cycle. 👉theserverlessedge.com/scorp-process-… In the meantime enjoy the break with family and friends. #HappyChristmas #EngineeringLeadership #Serverless