https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewfhart/8106200690

Recently I signed up for the A Cloud Guru AWS advanced networking certification prep course put together by Adrian Cantrill.

After the obligatory OSI 7-layer modules, which I watched because you never know, things rapidly got interesting. I found myself learning about BGP, AWS VPC peering, how to multi-home EC2 instances with ENIs, how to set up a shared-services network that could talk to peered VPCs with overlapping CIDR ranges (turns out it’s not even that difficult), and all kinds of really cool stuff.

I got nerd-sniped. Big time. Networking was a big part of my early career, and the course scraped a bunch of rust off and added a whole new layer of awesome things to learn about. My brain was all hopped up on learning-juice, spinning and carousing and saying to itself “THIS IS SO COOL.”

Then something hit me like a cross-town bus.

Everything I’d just been geeking out about is completely irrelevant in the serverless world.

Last year I went to the first Serverlessconf. It was great, tons of fun; I met some really smart folks and learned that people are doing real work in a whole new way. There is a whole new solution space becoming available, a solution space where, as Tim Wagner put it, you don’t have to worry about whether you have cattle or pets, you just show up at the drive-through and get the burger you were looking for. It’s arguable that the vast majority of problems people are trying to solve today fit into this space: take an event, do some transforms on it, send it somewhere else, maybe do some aggregation and correlation later. It’s a way to focus on your core competency and let other folks worry about the servers, the mechanics of routing those events to your code, instantiating it, and keeping everything available.

As someone who’s pretty keenly interested in the future of serverless, it seems either traitorous or foolish to be taking a course on advanced networking.

What faithful, intelligent person would invest time in learning all sorts of networking shenanigans when there’s so much to learn in serverless space?

It’s a week later now, and I’ve realized that the answer to my question is “people like me.” People who think that even though there is a huge bright shiny serverless future out there, someone still has to know how it all fits together. People who think that the road between today and that shiny future will have more than one bump in it. People who just like learning new things every day.