Podcast_4_29_21
Amy: [00:00:00 ] This podcast was produced by hacker noon, hosted by me, Amy, Tom, and edited by Damien glow. Welcome. Welcome to the hacker noon podcast. This is Amy, Tom. I hope everyone is so excited to be here. If you're not listen, I don't know what to tell you. Turn this podcast off and listen to something else. But I think that you're going to have a great time today.
[00:00:25 ] Because my guest joining me today are Pavel from a webinar, the CTO of a webinar and Richard, the full-stack developer at hacker noon. So I am very excited to chat with you guys today. Pavel, how are you doing?
[00:00:41 ] Pavel: [00:00:41 ] Hey, everyone thinks Amy doing well
[00:00:43 ] welcome back
[00:00:44 ] Amy: [00:00:44 ] to the show. This is your second episode with us.
[00:00:48 ] Yeah. Richard's first podcast appearance. Richard, how are you?
[00:00:53 ] Richard: [00:00:53 ] I'm doing okay. Thanks. I am so excited to have you guys on today. I want to talk to you about serverless CMS platforms. So as we discussed in one of our last episodes, a few episodes ago, Pavel is the CTO at webinar.
[00:01:12 ] Amy: [00:01:12 ] And Pavel would you mind giving us again a brief introduction to what Webany is?
[00:01:16 ] Pavel: [00:01:16 ] Yeah, sure. So a webinar is an open source framework for development of full-stack applications, which run on serverless infrastructure. It's historical stepping a project, deploying it to your cloud, and it makes it really easy to get started. So you don't need to be a serverless guru.
[00:01:34 ] Amy: [00:01:34 ] Right. And one of the questions that I had right off the top of my head was why would one want to host a surrealist CMS as opposed to an on-prem CMS?
[00:01:45 ] Pavel: [00:01:45 ] So there are many points to this question and answer. So, there are, of course, some, some of that we covered in our last talk. So those who missed it, please have a listen and we will just cover some of that here. Serverless is slowly starting to actually it's picking up the bass quite fast. Why?
[00:02:05 ] Because it reduces the amount of DevOps. And knowledge of infrastructure and how you set it up, how you maintain it, all you care is how you write your business, logic, your application, right? I mean, some would argue that while there are still servers in the background, of course, but the point is that you don't need to manage them.
[00:02:24 ] There is a cloud provider who is taking care of operating system of scaling it for you. And it just provides you with a run time, which you use to run your application. And that's one of the key reasons why someone would want to start building their applications on top of servers. One of the reasons why it's so attractive is because of course, to run your own data center and build.
[00:02:49 ] Your entire infrastructure and everything you need highly qualified engineers and professionals who know what they're doing, right. Infrastructure is not simple. We used to run. So me and my co-founders and we used to run a web agency and we used to do everything from coding to infrastructure setup.
[00:03:06 ] And to be honest, we hated it. So the infrastructure. Can easily be like a full-time job and then somewhere. And then on top of that, you also need to develop your app, you know, satisfy your client requirements and stuff. So when Starla's popped up, it was really a solution to all the problems for people who are not very infrastructure oriented.
[00:03:29 ] And it cut costs because any small company has a very limited budget. So hiring a dev ops engineer is expensive. If you just Google an average salary in in the U S you get around from 100,000 to $150,000 per year for one engineer. It's a lot, not every startup, a small company can can afford having a team of dev ops, especially fully qualified with experience dev ops engineers in their company.
[00:03:56 ] So serverless provides a solution for that. You no longer need to build your data center. You no longer need to hire those expensive professionals. And the hiring is of course, complex enough for all the roles in your company. But with dev ops it's an, a whole new level. Also very often companies need to work on MDBs or proof of concept, small applications, where they don't need to, to over-engineer stuff.
[00:04:23 ] And every time you start building an MVP, Before serverless was around. You had to immediately start thinking, okay, how do I run my code? So containers right back in the days, bare metal servers, installing operating systems yourself. It's horrible. So containers solved part of the problem, but serverless is eliminating the problem.
[00:04:43 ] Entirely small companies on tight budget can immediately develop their software and run it. So it's like day one, run a software in the cloud.
[00:04:54 ] Amy: [00:04:54 ] Right, now Richard, I feel well, as the hacker noon podcast, host and editor, I am very unfamiliar with any kind of infrastructure system that we have set up. But I feel like with a company that is the size of ours, we have about 25 employees at this point. That this would be something that would be beneficial because we're kind of more of a startup. So what are your thoughts around?
[00:05:23 ] Richard: [00:05:23 ] Yeah, I mean, when I first saw that the title, like the implications of self hosted serverless, I got to admit, I thought something was a little bit of miss. I was curious of what it meant to be on. Like premise and serverless that, those kind of interests. So because I think of on-premise like you have a server you know, a physical server on hand that's, you're going to be loading stuff up and provisioning or whatnot. So that was one thing that popped out at me, but yeah, I mean, this, there's definitely an allure here because, um, I am also not the greatest fan of dealing with our Google cloud platform infrastructure stuff.
[00:05:57 ] So besides like writing software, we're trying to improve things for our users, but at the same time, we're managing a lot of the infrastructure and yeah, I, I wondered what it would take for someone to migrate to a system like this. So. Yeah, I definitely see the appeal of it. And I'm curious, you know, what kind of tools are there other people that have migrated from existing systems? Or do you usually see people adopting a Webany? That's like a Greenfield.
[00:06:23 ] Pavel: [00:06:23 ] Yeah. So far, when you, when we moved little bit of history, so when we moved from bare metal servers to containers, it was pretty much the same software. It was just virtualized the operating system, everything was virtualized and you could just.
[00:06:38 ] Copy and paste your code up there and it would work with serverless. Unfortunately you have to write your app differently. So an option of copy pasting is out of the window. You need to architect and then rewrite your apps. But from our experience with clients and companies, that approach us. They are totally okay with that.
[00:07:00 ] So we don't see that as being a, a blocker for them. In fact, it also pushes them to upgrade their step because sometimes there is a bunch of legacy software, which companies are afraid to even try to modify because don't touch it. If it ain't broken, if it works, just let it work, but it change and move to serverless.
[00:07:23 ] Forces you to rewrite. You just don't have an option. And in that case, companies are very often relieved to hear that they just have to rewrite stuff and then they can get rid of legacy stuff and maybe start using more popular and modern tools for other API APIs or whatnot.
[00:07:40 ] Richard: [00:07:40 ] That sounds neat. Um, yeah, I guess, um, I'm curious, like how the community is building up and how long have you guys been on?
[00:07:47 ] I know it's been like a few years, like since I saw I was looking at the project you'd like first, the first commit of your, your Git hub was pulling it all into one mana repo. Some of those kinds of interests. And I've had some discussions with some of the colleagues here about Mana repos and whatnot.
[00:08:02 ] I personally am a fan of keeping things together. If you can, don't make it more complicated if you don't need to, as far as the developer's perspective. So. Yeah, project management is definitely a challenge and we run on monitor repos and it's never ending debate out there. But you just have, so use the tools that solve a problem.
[00:08:24 ] Pavel: [00:08:24 ] We try to be as much as possible, you know, objective about things and just find the right tools to do, to do the work. If something works better in the monitor report, use that if something is better as a separate report, use that. But yeah, it's got to make a decision. Basically. It doesn't always matter what do it just be consistent, but with webinar, it solved a lot of problems and that's how we set up a projects for webinar users.
[00:08:50 ] And very often they discover among the ripples when they first installed webinar, it's like, wait a moment. This is kind of different type of project organization. What is it? And then they go through our docs where we explain that stuff, and then it's like, Oh, this is cool. You know, you can have all kinds of different parts of the system within one repository, which includes infrastructure and configurations for the entire AWS cloud.
[00:09:15 ] Plus your code plus, or business logic plus plugins and so on. So it is comfortable. That's interesting. So the the infrastructure is also up as code, right? It's a stick declarative. That's cool. Yeah. And below me to declare all the configurations and we like it because it's code, as we use TypeScript for everything below me is entirely.
[00:09:38 ] Java JavaScript, TypeScript compatible. And it gives us flexibility to do all kinds of stuff. We are not locked into Jamo files in a weird configurations. That's also one of the up and coming tools. I mean, the tool is brilliant. There are lots of huge companies using it and their company's growing really well.
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