Thread by @julian_wood

Some superb information from @matthew1000 on how the BBC is using cloud and #serverless: "Moving BBC Online to the cloud" medium.com/bbc-design-eng…

"The BBC website is huge. Over half the UK population use it every week. Tens of millions more use it around the world. It has content in 44 different languages. And it offers over 200 different types of page — from programmes and articles, to games and food recipes."

1) Don’t solve what’s been solved elsewhere - Around half of the BBC’s website is rendered serverlessly with AWS Lambda. Managing virtual machines (or containers) is expensive — keeping them secure, reliable and scalable takes time. Serverless mostly solves that problem for us.

2) Remove duplication (but don’t over-simplify) - "left unchecked, it can create multiple solutions that are incompatible and expensive to maintain."..."we must be wary of over-simplification. "

3) Break the tech silos through culture & communication."It’s hard to overstate the value of communication.Without it, teams cannot understand how their work fits alongside that of other teams. Without that understanding, they cannot see the opportunities to share and align. "

4) Organise around the problems: miro.medium.com/max/700/1*5TN4…

5) Plan for the future, but build for today - "We must plan for the future, so that we meet tomorrow’s needs as well as today’s. But we also don’t want to over-engineer. " - "Don’t solve problems until you’re sure they’re problems you actually have."

6) Build first, optimise later - "Use the benefit of agile development to respond to performance issues only when they become real.".."Performance using serverless has been excellent. By not optimising too early, we saved a huge amount of effort."

7) If the problem is complexity, start over - "Removing complexity from an existing system is hard."..."we had to start again, going back to the basics of what common abilities were needed."

8) Move fast, release early and often, stay reliable - "move quickly, so that you can learn and adapt. Release early, and often — even if it’s only to a small audience. "..."Smaller releases, done more often, are also an excellent way to minimise risk."

All this is super applicable to many other things. We're glad #serverless is helping the BBC achieve their goals.