The trend away from physical data centers toward cloud and software as a service allows businesses to get out of plumbing and work smarter, not harder. Or, in the case of serverless computing and functions as a service, the phrase should be “work dumber, not harder,” according to Ben Kehoe (pictured), cloud robotics research scientist at iRobot Corp.

“We need to reset expectations around what we have control over and what we don’t,” Kehoe said.

For all of traditional architecture’s hassles, it allows admins and developers control; they could reach in and tinker whenever they chose. Functions as a service platforms and managed services generally are simpler. However, “When the provider has some sort of incident, you’re out of control of that; it’s a very uncomfortable place to be,” Kehoe added.

But does this discomfort have a rational basis? “When you look at the big picture, that’s going to happen less often than if you were doing it yourself,” Kehoe told Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during in an interview at the ServerlessConf event in New York City.

Code lines meet bottom lines

Unfortunately, many mature monitoring tools on the market are ill-suited to serverless architecture, according to Kehoe. In the case of network analysis, for instance: “It’s like, ‘Well, I don’t have any servers.’ And those vendors then say, ‘Well, we can’t help you,'” Kehoe said.

Similarly, static code analysis vendors look at the entire application and its contents. When a company running serverless code tells them, “‘I just write little bits that glue it together in the way the that my business works,’ they say, ‘Oh, well we can’t help you,” Kehoe stated. Fortunately, this broken record is about to stop skipping; some monitoring tools to help lift the veil somewhat on functions and managed services are cropping up, he explained.

Developers building serverless applications may take to working dumber a bit reluctantly at first. “When you’re developing, you’re solving a computer science problem. But often that means you’re not delivering business value,” he said.

Simply pulling services together to ship features out the door “means that you’re delivering value, and you’re operating more in your business space than in a technology space,” Kehoe concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ServerlessConf event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE