In 12–18 months serverless wont be a ‘thing ‘— it wont be anything special, just another tool in a developer or solution architecture tool-chain.

There wont be as much demand for conferences around it — just like we don’t have TCP/IP-conf, or n-tier-conf, or client-server-app-conf. Methods of implementing things change — but generally the core technologies to do so don’t — or at a much slower pace.

It’s always been my view that to be a truly effective designer and implementor of advanced/complex systems you NEED to understand the plumbing. YES, you can avoid it and still reach 50% effectiveness but knowing, in this case how the internet is built, allows you to understand, fault find, fix and secure complex problems or performance concerns.

So… everyone in IT should know at least Networking, DNS, IP Security Concepts, a major cloud platform, 1 programming language and a few solid architectural foundations — otherwise you are just winging it.