Takahiro Horike

Interview with Takahiro Horike

I majored in electrical engineering as a college student. In Japan, during your senior year of college, everyone is assigned to a lab.

During my lab assignment, I ended up needing to write a simulation of visualizing electromagnetic waves. That’s how I got involved in software programming for the first time. I instantly loved it.

After graduating, I started working at an IT company near my hometown, creating a mobile web application with PHP, JavaScript and HTML. From there, I worked on various other web application projects. The foundation of my programming skills was built on those experiences.

One day, I started learning WordPress from my co-worker. That was my first experience diving into the OSS community. I really took advantage of their events and meetups. Then I started organizing events myself, creating WordPress plugins, and so on.

I think my open-source mindset was formed at that time.

Since the announcement for Lambda and API Gateway in 2014!

I had been an AWS user since my current company, Digital Cube, started offering a hosting service for WordPress on AWS.

After graduating, I started working at an IT company near my hometown, creating a mobile web application with PHP, JavaScript and HTML. From there, I worked on various other web application projects. The foundation of my programming skills was built on those experiences.

It was hard to deploy and manage Lambda functions (and by default serverless architectures). I noticed serverless computing had various issues and problems. I wanted to improve them because I could tell that my ideal programming world was so, so close. And I could help make it a reality!

However, improving Lambda was too hard, because to do that I’d have to join the team at AWS. That’s a high hurdle.

Then, I found the Serverless Framework. I love Cloud and OSS, so the Serverless Framework attitude and way just fit my mindset well. OSS was not a high hurdle. It was then that I decided to improve the serverless computing world by working on the Serverless Framework movement.

A couple of months later after Lambda was released, I was participating in a conference related to AWS. The Serverless Framework was introduced in a session.

I think these are the two biggest challenges:

• How should we manage an application that has many microservices?
• How should we manage security across many microservices?

A lot of serverless applications need to be composed of several services (like CloudFormation in AWS), and then we may need to create many Git repositories to manage each service. The bigger the service you have, the more complex it gets. We should find a way to manage and visualize a bunch of microservices.

The other important thing is a security across microservices. For example, when microservices are divided into organizations or roles, it would be nice if those were protected by something on a security filter like AWS IAM.

I write most of my functions on AWS because I use that at work.

The top item on my wishlist would be to provide something that makes it easier to realize what I want to do.

Recently, I’ve been playing with GCP a little bit because interested in self-hosted FaaS, like OpenFaas and Kubeless. GCP makes it easy to build a Kubernetes cluster.

I feel today’s serverless space is still too complex.

I expect that serverless computing will be programming-less computing in the future. I don’t know exactly what this will look like, but for example—I think we’ll be able to build applications by choosing a service and any data sources via GUI, sort of like IFTTT. Then we’d be able to connect them together by unified-specification events.

For example, the goal of Serverless Dashboard for Atom is to make developers not even aware of the cloud. They can publish a service by just clicking the ‘deploy’ button.

I think the deploy-with-serverless plugin has a similar concept.

One of the key features of FaaS is that it’s event-driven. However, building any system by only event-driven architecture is a little bit too restrictive.

In the near future, It may be important to build those by combining containers and FaaS. This may facilitate serverless architecture adoption by larger organizations.

The most are about the Serverless Step Functions plugin. I’m always happy to hear that someone’s application went live with the plugin!

I hope that more people who are in the Japanese serverless community will actively participate in the global serverless community.

Serverless computing hasn’t yet reached maturity, and the serverless computing community in general is centered around the global one. If many of us can participate in the global community, the evolution of serverless will be even more powerful.

The Japanese community is huge but it is a local one. We have to overcome the language barrier.

To be honest, I’m not sure what I should do to have this be realized. Japanese language support or blog post translations might be effective, but we won’t know until we try.

For another idea, I’ve been considering a workshop on how to contribute to the Serverless Framework, where I would prepare some relatively easy-to-resolve Framework issues in advance and attendees will send PRs during the workshop. I would support, review and merge those there. It would be nice to do if it’d end up being an entrance to the global community for them.