Episode #84: Serverless Compute at the Edge with Tyler McMullen

Serverless Chats

About Tyler McMullen

Tyler McMullen is CTO at Fastly, a global edge cloud platform, where he is responsible for evolving the system architecture and the company’s technology vision. He leads a team of experienced technology innovators focused on internet scale, and working on future-facing, ambitious projects and standards. As part of the founding team at Fastly, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. Prior to joining Fastly, Tyler worked on large scale web applications, text analysis, and performance. He can be found debating about edge computing, networking, and distributed systems all over the world.

Fastly: fastly.com
Email: [e-mail]

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3F5COSkQlf0

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone! I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm chatting with Tyler McMullen. Hey, Tyler. Thanks for joining me.

Tyler: Hey, Jeremy. Nice to see you.

Jeremy: So, you are the CTO at Fastly. I'd love to know a little bit about your background, and what Fastly does.

Tyler: I'll start with what Fastly does. Fastly is an edge cloud platform. What that ends up meaning is that we help people to move their content, as well as their logic, their actual programs, out to run on the edge of the network. The whole goal of that is to make things much faster for your users, better user experience, as well as much more resilient.

It's actually a super exciting place to be, in my opinion. I got into, we founded Fastly, oh, wow. 10 years ago now, maybe more. I can't remember off the top of my head now, but it's been a while. I remember getting into it specifically because Archer, who was our CEO and our primary founder, came to me and he was like, "I have this idea. It's a content delivery network, but it's more like an edge computing network." I was working at a startup at the time. I said, "That sounds extremely exciting." As a distributed systems nerd, that was just, oh, man! It's catnip to me.

Jeremy: Right.

Tyler: So, for the last 10 years it's continued to be exciting. That's how it got started there.

Jeremy: Awesome. What about your background?

Tyler: My background is, I was just a kid who taught myself to program, and got started working when I was about 16 years old, and just never stopped. I skipped the whole college thing and hopped from startup to tech company to startup.

Jeremy: Awesome. So, I'm a huge fan of serverless. Again, I do a serverless podcast, so it's probably quite obvious to people. But one of the things that I am absolutely fascinated with is the idea of serverless computing at the edge, which is one of these things that Fastly is doing. I think that there's a possibility that this could be the future of serverless computing. No more data centers, or things like that, or regions. It's just right at the edge, and as close as possible, that we could get to the user that is actually interacting with this stuff. So obviously, a huge challenge, lots of things that need to be done to make that happen. But I think what would be great for the listeners is if we just take a step back and explain exactly what we mean by compute at the edge.

Tyler: Sure, sure. It's actually a great question, because this is something that keeps coming up. For years, I have been trying to explain exactly what is edge computing. The problem is that everybody has a different opinion as to what exactly it means. I think that the ultimate problem is that depending on who you talk to, that person is familiar with or working on one particular line. One particular edge, effectively, of that network.

So, if you're talking to someone who works at a telecom, they're going to talk about 5G, and how it needs servers inside of cell towers, effectively. Meanwhile, you talk to a traditional ops person, talk to an ops person from the '90s. The way that they think about the edge is actually the edge of their own network. It's kind of the border between their autonomous system and the rest of the network, the rest of the internet. You talk to me, we're going to talk about metro area data centers, as well as even more narrow ones.

Anyway, the list goes on and on. So to me, I think it's actually kind of, the problem is, in my opinion, in the word. The problem is the word "edge," because it implies a line. It implies a specific point within the network, and I don't think that's actually true. Because if you think about all of these different places that we're talking about having computation, they all have really important similarities in their models. The point is that it's not the client. It's not actually the person that you're interacting with. It's also not within your own specific data center. It's not within your core computing.

Everything in between there has a certain set of problems. It means that you don't necessarily have direct access to a database. It means that you probably have to think about doing things in a little bit more of a stablest way. It means that you need to think about doing things at high performance. So, I think that when we talk about edge computing, what we're really talking about is computing in the middle. It's between you and your data center, and your actual client.

Jeremy: Yeah. I think about it a lot. I try to look at it like a CDN. I think of something like a Cloudflare, or even CloudFront with AWS, where they have all these points of presence all over the world. Generally, even Akamai, and some of these other ones that have been around for a really long time, thinking about, you store some sort of static asset somewhere at the edge. It's a .pdf that people can download, or it's an image that loads faster, or what's been really cool happening now is a lot of the stuff with Jamstack, where they're putting HTML, pre-rendered HTML pages on the edge. So, things are just loading insanely fast.

But the idea of finding somewhere to do compute, where actually you can run some sort of business logic. That business logic might be as simple as saying, "Do I route them to the login page, or do I route them to a sign in page?" Or whatever it is, I route them somewhere differently. But the logic could be much more complex, as well. That's what's interesting to me is, if you think about it as a CDN, but with compute, then that unlocks a lot of really powerful use cases.

So, I'm just curious where you see edge computing, maybe a mixture of what we just talked about, some sort of hybrid of the definition, where you see edge computing integrating with what you think of as the traditional CDN.

Tyler: Oh. That's not where I thought you were going with that question. That's really cool. No, this is great. I think it's the mirror of it. You talk about a CDN, you're talking about moving the content. Now we're talking about moving the logic that generates the content. So, the integration there I think is actually going to end up being, for a lot of folks, super tight. It's actually, in my opinion, going to be pretty hard to have a proper, widely used, edge compute network without actually having a CDN attached to it.

I think there's a bunch of different reasons for that. One of them is that almost by its own definition, you're going to end up running the same code repeatedly. If we're talking about an HVP, like a website of some kind, or an API of some kind. You're going to be loading the same things repeatedly. Realistically, that's how the i...