Great rock n’ roll comes from experimentation and innovation, making developer operations and music twin souls of creative focus. The two merge in Fender Digital, the development arm of Fender Musical Instrument Corp.

“[Fender Digital] focuses on all-new digital products to complement [Fender’s] well-known physical products,” said Michael Garski (pictured), director of software engineering at Fender Musical Instruments.

Garski spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the ServerlessConf event in San Francisco. They discussed Fender’s adoption of serverless computing to support services for the company’s web and mobile apps.

Serverless enables low-cost experimentation for developers

Building Fender Digital’s flagship product Fender Play, an instructional app for learning to play instruments, and the Fender Tone remote amp controller app were great use examples for serverless, according to Garski. “[Fender] Tone has a very limited audience; it’s whoever buys the amplifier, so we’re not talking millions of people. So it was a very good use case to go ahead and do that. With [Fender] Play where we were starting a new business, [serverless is] a great model for us so we can just pay for usage,” he said.

The engineers on Garski’s team have free rein to do whatever they want to in the development environment. “They can spin up whatever they need to,” Garski said. Despite this freedom, Fender’s costs for AWS Lambda’s serverless compute are low.

“In the month of June we spent … like $132 for 68 million Lambda invocations,” Garski said.

Garski is considering moving data currently in DynamoDB over to Aurora serverless: “As requirements have shifted … it’s become very difficult to model in DynamoDB, so we’re gonna take a look at that and possibly move to [the] Aurora service,” he said.

The one use case that Garski does not consider practical for serverless is for very low-latency applications. “If you’re doing an auto-complete for a search system, you want that snappy,” he said.

Garski encourages his peers to try out serverless compute services: “Just dive in; get started; don’t hesitate. It doesn’t cost you anything really to experiment with it,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ServerlessConf event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE