ServerlessConf'18 in San Francisco - Day One

ServerlessConf

Serverless

The creation of an Alexa skill in 2016 was this aha moment I discovered the concept of serverless or more precisely Function as a Service a.k.a. FaaS.

This was a great experience. For the first time in my life as a developer, I had to focus on one thing and one thing only: what I want the code to perform and how to invoke it. No need for installing a server, configuring an application server, tuning and tweaking it, patching, all the system stuff that I am not really passionate about. On top of that, the price of running our Serverless app is very attractive.

Since then, I have followed the Serverless movement on Twitter, YouTube and also media. From an external point of view, I can safely say that it is still very nascent and few people:

a) know about Serverless

b) have played with it

c) even less have implemented it in Enterprise.

On that topic, it is difficult to find figures/reports on the pace of serverless adoption on the Enterprise market. No doubt that for startups, it is a great opportunity to focus on the code only for a fraction of the price it would require.

However, on the Enterprise market, I believe that only what we call “Cloud First” aka companies that have already made the move to IaaS, SaaS, and other platforms some years ago, are implementing such architecture: the like of Capital One for example.

Nevertheless, the movement is growing and I expect it to become huge 2-3 years from now. ACloudGuru, which is famous for offering great courses on Cloud Technology and preparation courses to take certifications, have built their entire website based on Serverless components. They are big believers in Serverless and have been organizing/sponsoring Serverless Conference in various locations in the world.

This week the ServerlessConf is taking place in San Francisco, CA and I have been lucky enough to win a free ticket at ACloudGuru’s raffle.

Free Ticket :-)

Day One

The conference is taking place at the Regency Center on Van Ness Avenue and it is a beautiful venue. Probably not the best for this type of conference because of the way the building is structured but a beautiful place.

There are two tracks: the main stage and in parallel the sponsor showcase.

As always, in this kind of event, there is a mix of fantastic speakers and some that are not so inspiring but overall, the content is valuable.

There were two talks that I really enjoyed:

• Adrian Cockcroft (@adrianco) VP at AWS who talked about the evolution of business logics from monoliths to Microservices to Functions. He is a great speaker, the slides were crystal clear and the point of view was all about the value and business outcomes and how FaaS can help the developers to focus on them. I had the opportunity to discuss with him yesterday evening about the market trends and the forcing “functions” to drive a better business outcome-driven world thanks to Serverless.

• Joe Emison (@JoeEmison) whose speech was about building better application architecture with Serverless. He is a great speaker, very enthusiast and inspiring. He raised a lot of good points and I’ll try to discuss with him today.

There were as well ‘Think FaaS’ lightning session (named after the podcast from Trek10) with 4 speakers presenting on a topic in 5 min. Most of them did a fantastic job at developing a point of view in a clear and concise way. I really enjoyed Andrea Passwater (@andreapasswater) presentation about how people with no code experience at all can leverage Serverless.

Today, I am really looking forward to attending Simon Wardley’s presentation as well as Sam Kroonenburg (ACloudGuru’s co-founder).