Learn E-Commerce Serverless Solutions

Interview with Richard Moot

Northeast PHP recently spoke with Richard Moot, developer evangelist at Square. We're pleased that Richard will be attending this year's Northeast PHP conference, where he will speak about serverless solutions.

▶ Richard, it is a pleasure to speak with you today. You are a developer evangelist at Square - what's that like?

It is great. I get to go around to different cities to talk to developers about what they’re working on. I write a lot of blog posts, build example applications, go to meetups, talk about solutions that Square can offer for taking payments online and in person.

▶ Your Northeast PHP talk subject is serverless computing, what is that?

Serverless computing is used to easily deploy mini-applications that don’t require a lot of configuration and can scale automatically. It fits well in infrastructure gaps where you might not want to dedicate a server application running 100% of the time, like image processing, ETLs, or managing pub/sub queues.

▶ The hype for serverless is fairly new, but like any hot technology, there is usually a good reason for the hype.

For programs that only run occasionally, like a cron job, a serverless function could be really useful since you’re only paying for it when its running. There are drawbacks, since you’re giving up control of your application and trusting your cloud provider to spin up the container and keeping it warm. Cloud providers have been working on translating the serverless hype to practical solutions, optimizing to alleviate some of the more painful aspects.

▶ Any good examples?

If you are consuming webhooks from a bunch of different providers, a serverless function could be really useful to manage inconsistent traffic. If you suddenly get a spike of events coming through your web hooks, that serverless function will automatically scale up with additional containers to service all of the events.

It also works well if you send out a lot of webhooks. You might not have a consistent stream of events going through your system, or just have sudden moments of high volume that need to go out. You can again allow serverless functions to scale up and get those webhook events out more rapidly.

▶ Could you give us a quick description of the serverless application you developed?

Certainly. I built an end-to-end serverless application as a proof-of-concept. A Square Seller (User) can create “Instant Checkout” links to let customers immediately checkout an item. The application was split into 4 different functions for oAuth authorization, generating the access token, producing the catalog of links, and creating the checkout page.

This allows a Square Seller to sell digital goods in a way that can scale almost unlimitedly, like handling a surge of customers from a viral Twitter or Instagram post allows to immediately buy the product. With flat rate shipping, it can work for physical goods too.

▶ For our audience of web designers and developers, you have interesting options for them to look into.

We can help developers take payments on their website or in-person using our hardware. Or, we can assist with managing their business. We have a lot of API’s that are intended to help manage payment related tasks. We are also building a platform for developers who are interested in building tools and applications that can help other businesses. Our newest release of our Reader SDK lets developers build their own POS system. Mobile developers could build a custom way for people to take payments in person with their own iOS or Android application.

▶ What made you decide to speak at NEPHP, and what do you hope to get out of the conference?

Northeast PHP lets us reach more web developers to tell them about what’s possible in the realm of serverless, and also share the great API’s we’re building that can make them money.

▶ Networking with peers and solution providers is certainly where attendees will find a lot of value in attending. Thank you Richard for your time and we look forward to having you here in Boston.