Who’s Jeff?—Things we learned at #Serverlessconf London 2016
Conferences come with a lot of inside jokes, and part of the fun for attendees is figuring out what they could possibly mean.
At Serverlessconf London, one of the tracks is called “Jeff”. I had no idea why—I assumed Jeff was the name of the MC, or maybe that Jeff was one of the organizers and sufficiently famous to go by his first name only. “Oh, you must meet Jeff!”.
Nope. “Jeff” is what serverless might have been named otherwise, as explained by Paul Johnston: “Serverless” is just a name. We could have called it “Jeff”. The point of Paul’s article is that serverless could have been called anything. Names are arbitrary and never perfect. Serverless does not mean there are literally no servers, it just means that you’re not the one running and maintaining them.
At Serverlessconf, a full conference track was named Jeff, to remind us not to bikeshed on names and save our energy for bikeshedding when it really matters ;)
The FaaS Track
Function-as-a-Service—this track’s name is a bit more obvious. Here are a few tweets and quotes that stood out to me from FaaS, the larger of the two rooms.
I feel like this slide by Adobe’s Lars Trieloff sums up the serverless ideology quite well:
Charity Majors dazzled us with Serverlessness, NoOps and the Tooth Fairy. And yes there were rainbows! 🌈 Charity and some other very smart ex-Parse folks are behind honeycomb.io which you should check out if you haven’t already.
I couldn’t find a picture of Erik Windisch up on stage, but his new Techstars-accelerated company IOpipe lets you do analytics and distributed tracing on AWS Lambda. Here’s an example of the kind of insights they’re able to generate.
Firebase has been helping developers go serverless before it was even a thing. Here’s Mike McDonald talking about realtime and How Firebase helps developers create extraordinary experiences.
Serverless CTO Florian Motlik gave a very well-attended talk about Getting the most out of the Serverless Framework. A great way to get started with the Serverless framework is by reading the docs.
The Jeff Track
Low on bikeshedding, high on clapping. Serverless is still in its infancy but evolves rapidly. More lessons learned from Rafal Gancarz:
My Algolia teammates Tim Carry and Alexandre Collin gave a talk on Thursday about how to build an instantsearch application in less than 15 minutes featuring some live coding. Thankfully, the demo gods were cooperative.
No technical conference or political revolution is complete without a manifesto. This is Ken Payne of AWS’s for serverless compute:
Alexander Stigsen from Realm (the awesome mobile database and now mobile platform) encouraged us to think about device and network failure modes that REST is ill-suited for.
Like serverless, GraphQL is heating up. Jared Short talked about why GraphQL can make sense for serverless applications. Not even the 3pm building fire alarm test could stop him.
Did I not give you a shout-out for your talk? It isn’t because I don’t like you, it’s because A LOT happened at Serverless. If you’d like to be added to this article just tweet at me ☺
Presentations / Resources
A few slides are up already and I’ll add more as I find them:
- Serverless for Developers: Tips for Your Next App by Danilo Poccia
- Zappa: Serverless Python Web Services
- Understanding AWS Lambda Coldstarts by IOpipe
Thanks!
The Algolia team and I want to thank the organizers, sponsors and attendees for making the event a big success. We had a great time and look forward to continuing the conversation online… or at the next Serverlessconf! 😀⚡️
If your serverless OR (gasp) server-based application needs search, you might give Algolia a try. Our expertise in speed, relevance and user experience can also be yours.
Get 2 months free today with code SERVERLESS2016.
