Serverless Chats

About Ant Stanley:

Ant is a consultant and community organizer. He founded and currently runs the Serverless User Group in London, is part of the ServerlessDays London organizing team and the global ServerlessDays leadership team. Previously Ant was a co-founder of A Cloud Guru, and was responsible for organizing the first ServerlessConf event in New York in May 2016. Living in London since 2009, Ant's background before Serverless is primarily as a Solution Architect at various organisations, from managed service providers to Tier 1 telecommunications providers. He started his career in 1999 doing Y2K upgrades in his native South Africa, and then spent 5 years being paid to write VB6. His current focus is Serverless, GraphQL and Node.js.

• Twitter: @IamStan
• ServerlessDays: serverlessdays.io
• For organizer information: [email protected]

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Ant Stanley. Hi, Ant. Thanks for joining me.

Ant: Hey Jeremy. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jeremy: You're the co-founder of ServerlessDays Global. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what ServerlessDays is all about.

Ant: Yes, I helped co-found ServerlessDays in 2017. I've been an early member of the Serverless community. I originally was one of the co-founders of A Cloud Guru and helped get Serverless [Consults 00:00:30] off the ground. After leaving Cloud Guru, I took a year off, worked on a few side projects, then joined up with a few folks here in London, and we decided to get a community-based Serverless conference going. It was supposed to be one conference called JeffConf. Then, it took off and became a thing of its own due to the amazing community. That's pretty much, not quite how we got there, but it's the start of how we got to where we are.

Jeremy: All right. I actually want to talk to you about ServerlessDays. So I helped co-organize ServerlessDays Boston, a crazy event. I went to one in New York, and I've seen, basically, these ones all over the place now. I went to one in Milan. This is becoming a pretty big thing. So, there's all kinds of ways people can get involved. There's some really, really great speakers at these events, but I just want to talk about, really, how this got started. Let's go way back to the beginning, understand what the motivation was behind it. Then, let's talk about some of the events that are happening around the world and, then maybe, how people can get involved. Why don't we start with that? What's the history of this whole thing?

Ant: The history, it goes back to April, May 2017. There was due to be a Serverless conference in Amsterdam, run by the then organizers of the Serverless user group in Amsterdam, and it, kind of, fell apart. I think end of April, beginning of May, it got canceled. I don't think they could raise enough sponsorship funds. I think they were trying to go too big, and, at the time, that was going to be the only Serverless conference in Europe that year. So at the time, I ran the... Well, I still do... run the Serverless user group in London, which is the largest Serverless user group in the world at this point in time. I had a conversation with Paul Johnston. He used to work for AWS and he's one of the early the early Serverless bloggers or contributors, and James Thomas is a Developer Advocate for IBM, on their OpenWhisk functions platform. He's also London-based.

The three of us had a conversation via a Slack channel. I'm saying, "Well, there isn't anything happening in Europe this year. Why don't we try and organize something?" What became an idea, started to become reality, and Paul popped up, and he said, "I might have a venue that's really cheap." So I said, "Well, I've got a user group with a whole bunch of users, and we don't have anything planned in the summer because that's normally an awful time to run a user group cleanup. So, I said, "Well, let's try and run an event." We decided to call it JeffConf, based on a very bad joke, because of the name Serverless. The in-joke, at the time, was we could've called Serverless anything. We might as well have called it Jeff. So, as a joke, we decided to call this thing JeffConf.

We organized it in six weeks from the point of saying, "Yes, let's do this," to actually running the event. It was a six-week window. We didn't run a CFP. We ran on an absolute sh...

About Farrah Campbell:

After 10 years of working in healthcare management, a serendipitous 20-minute car ride with Kara Swisher inspired Farrah to make the jump into technology. She has worked at multiple startups in many different capacities, eventually working her way to being the Ecosystems Director for Stackery in Portland, Oregon. As the Stackery Ecosystems Director, Farrah has managed the Stackery relationship with AWS including Stackery as an Advanced Technology Partner, achieving the AWS DevOps Competency, a launch partner for Lambda Layers. Farrah has cultivated the serverless community as an organizer of Portland Serverless Days, the Portland Serverless Meetup, along with numerous serverless workshops and the Portland tech community events from Techfest to bringing multiple luminaries to Portland. She's also an AWS Serverless Hero.

• Twitter: @FarrahC32
• Email: [email protected]

About Danielle Heberling:

Danielle Heberling is a software engineer with a background that includes being a musician and teaching at a K-8 public school. She’s passionate about building things that make the world a better place, whether that be through social change or a good laugh. When she’s not coding, you can often find her reaching back to her teaching roots by mentoring folks from underrepresented groups that would like to make a career switch into tech.

• Twitter: @deeheber
• Email: [email protected]

Notes:

• Translator GitHub Repo: https://github.com/stackery/language-translator
• Translator App: www.serverlessing.io
• Stackery Blog: https://www.stackery.io/blog/
• re:Invent Session: https://www.portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/search.ww?searchPhrase=DVC16

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with Farrah Campbell and Danielle Heberling. Hi Farrah and Danielle, thanks for joining me.

Farrah: Hey Jeremy, thanks for having me.

Danielle: Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you both work at Stackery and we can talk a little bit more about what Stackery does in a bit, but I want to start with you Farrah because you are the ecosystems director there and I think it's a really interesting role. Can you tell us what that's all about?

Farrah: Sure. Well, essentially the way I look at it is my job is to connect with people across AWS and other technical partners along with the serverless ecosystem so that we can increase serverless adoption.

Jeremy: Awesome. And Danielle, you are a software engineer at Stackery, and I'm curious what that role looks like when you are building serverless applications to help people build serverless applications.

Danielle: Yeah, it's pretty meta actually. Well, at Stackery we're a small startup. There's only six software engineers total. So I guess you could say we're all technically full stack, so I just jump in anywhere in the stack where I'm needed. And sometimes do customer support too.

Jeremy: Very cool. So I saw the two of you give a talk at Serverlessconf, New York, called Leveling Up Serverless. And you talk about this app that you built and we will get into that in a minute, but what I really loved about your talk was the story behind it. And as you both explained, you have very different backgrounds. Neither of you started in tech, but somehow you sort of serendipitously came across serverless, started participating in the serverless community. And that's what inspired you and enabled you in a way to actually build this application. And I think your story is inspiring, especially to people who are getting into tech or thinking about getting into tech. So I'd love to just talk about your experiences today and we can go through that. So Farrah, let's start with you. How did you get into tech?

Farrah: Well, my intro to tech wasn't like many people's, I hear. In fact, it wasn't until after high school that I really actually explored the internet. My mom had met a new man that she married who owned a computer company called MicroAge and he started a new startup in the back of that where he had multiple engineers working.

And I talked him into letting me work for them to research th...

This is PART 2 of my conversation with Michael Hart. View PART 1.

About Michael Hart

Michael has been fascinated with serverless, and managed services more generally, since the early days of AWS because he’s passionate about eliminating developer pain. He loves the power that serverless gives developers by reducing the number of moving parts they need to know and think about. He has written libraries like dynalite and kinesalite to help developers test by replicating AWS services locally. He enjoys pushing AWS Lambda to its limits. He wrote a continuous integration service that runs entirely on Lambda and docker-lambda, which he maintains and updates regularly, and has gone on to become the underpinning of AWS SAM Local (now AWS SAM CLI).

• Twitter: @hichaelmart
• Github: github.com/mhart
• Medium: medium.com/@hichaelmart

Transcript:

Jeremy: Alright, so now we're going to go to the next level stuff, right? So if you’ve been...

Michael: That's not next level enough for you.

Jeremy: Well, that's what I’m saying. If you made it this far, I hate to tell you what we just talked about was kid's stuff, right? We're going to the next level. Alright. So you have been working on a new project called Yumda, right? Tell us about this. Because this thing — this blows my mind.

Michael: Right. So this is basically what was born out of the realization that people have struggled traditionally to get things compiled — native binaries or anything like that compiled for Lambda. For example, if you do want to write a CI system like lambci, then you will need some sort of git binary or a git library. But I would suggest using the git binary because libgit is just not there with all the features, But, you know, you'll need to get binary running on your Lambda so you can do a git clone of the repo that you're then going to do your CI test on, and getting that on Amazon Linux 1 was kind of hard enough. Getting it on Amazon Linux 2 is much harder, because there are so many fewer dependencies that exist there. I think on Amazon Linux 1 already had — it has curl on it. You know, if you're in Node.js 8, you could just shell out to curl, so a git has curl as a dependency. So if you're compiling git for, you know, the older runtimes you didn't need to worry about a curl or anything like that. You just need to worry about git. On Amazon Linux 2, you don't have curl, you don't have some really, really basic system libraries. So if you want to get git running on Amazon Linux 2, you need to pull in a lot of stuff yourself. And I got to thinking, well, what would be the best way to provide, you know, a bunch of pre-built packages out of the box? Yes, you could use layers. And I think layers are a great idea for very high-level packages, very, very large binaries that have a huge tree of dependencies or certain utilities. But it's impractical to be creating a layer for every single dependency that your native binary's going to use. You don't want to be creating one layer for libcurl, and another layer for libssh and another layer for this. Firstly, you're only limited to five layers that you can currently use in your Lambda, so you'd need to be squashing them together anyway. And secondly, it's just layers, certainly as they stand at the moment, they're not — if there's no particularly good discovery around them. It's nothing like doing an `npm install` or a `yum install` or something like that.

Jeremy: Well, and I also think that many of those layers, that if you install five layers, that a lot of those might be sharing dependencies under the hood as well, like they might have shared dependencies and then you might be installing those twice or three times. I don't know if they would...

Michael: Right, right, could they be clashing.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Michael: No, no.

Jeremy: But anyway, sorry.

Michael: No, no. So that's another consideration. So I thought, well, ideally, what people want to do, and this is certainly what people do in the container world, if you're writing a Docker container, you know, and you need native dependencies, one of the first steps you'll do in your Docker file is you'll do `yum install` whatever dependency I need. And that'll go down and pull all the ...

About Michael Hart

Michael has been fascinated with serverless, and managed services more generally, since the early days of AWS because he’s passionate about eliminating developer pain. He loves the power that serverless gives developers by reducing the number of moving parts they need to know and think about. He has written libraries like dynalite and kinesalite to help developers test by replicating AWS services locally. He enjoys pushing AWS Lambda to its limits. He wrote a continuous integration service that runs entirely on Lambda and docker-lambda, which he maintains and updates regularly, and has gone on to become the underpinning of AWS SAM Local (now AWS SAM CLI).

• Twitter: @hichaelmart
• Github: github.com/mhart
• Medium: medium.com/@hichaelmart

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Michael Hart. Hey, Michael. Thanks for joining me.

Michael: G’day, Jeremy, mate. How’s it going? You having a good day? Is everything going alright so far?

Jeremy: I love the Australian. I love the Australian accent. You don't actually talk like that, but that was...

Michael: I don't know what you're talking about. I talk like this all the time. Yeah, I do. I do wonder. I feel like if I did speak like that all the time, people might find me charming, but I don't think they'd have a clue what I was saying.

Jeremy: Exactly. Yeah. No, I actually thought Australians spoke English until I met a bunch of Australians, and I said I don't know if that's English, but anyway, so it's awesome to have you here. You’re the VP of Research Engineering at Bustle. You're also an AWS serverless hero. Why don't you tell the listeners a little about your background, what you do, and what's going on at Bustle?

Michael: Sure. So a little bit of my background: I have started a couple of companies, co-founded a couple of companies, been CTO before, in Australia. This was moved to New York, did a bit of consulting and then joined Bustle as the VP of Research Engineering. So I, you know, do a bunch of interesting research things there. Bustle is a digital media company. We have a bunch of sites, mainly targeted at sort of millennial women, although we've recently been expanding that market.

Jeremy: Awesome.

Michael: And we have, just in the last year or two, I think I think we've sort of acquired or started about nine other sites, so yeah, growing.

Jeremy: And you guys are using serverless up and down your entire stack.

Michael: Yes, serverless across the board. Yeah. Been pretty early on that, yeah.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, so I have had a number of conversations with you. We were out in Seattle. We were out in New York City the other day. We've had a ton of conversations about serverless and Lambda and all these things that it can do. I would have recorded the conversations, but usually we're in a bar drinking Old Fashioneds or just being, you know, whatever, and the audio quality wouldn't be that good. So anyways, I want to talk to you about all these cool things that you do with Lambda functions because I have talked to tons of people and I capture use cases in my newsletter every single week and, you know, they're interesting things, but I don't think I've met anybody who has pushed Lambda to the limits like you have. And, I mean, not just like one thing, like multiple things. So I want to get into all of that stuff. But just maybe we could start by talking about, you know, in case people don't know, what is it— The Lambda function itself, it's actually an execution environment. There's an Amazon Linux runtime underneath there, or operating system underneath there. So you know this inside and out. And this will become abundantly clear that you know probably more about this than some of the AWS engineers as we go through this, but just let's start with that. What is a Lambda function? What is it made up of?

Michael: Sure. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. It is the environment that your function is running in is sitting on Amazon Linux, until very recently until the Node.js 10 runtime. That was all Amazon Linux 1, which is getting pretty old now. And then the ruttimes themselves would would sit on top of that just ...

About Jared Short:
Jared has been building and operating serverless technologies in production at scale since 2015, and is laser focused on helping companies deliver business value with a serverless mindset. Jared is currently Senior Cloud Engineer, Developer Accelerator, at Trek10, Inc. but was formerly Head of Developer Experience and Relations at Serverless, Inc. and an early contributor to the Serverless Framework. In his current role, Jared's day-to-day is serverless all the time, as he helps people build and operate cloud native architectures.

• Twitter: twitter.com/ShortJared
• Email: [email protected]
• Website: jaredshort.com/
• 3 Guiding Principles for Building New SaaS Products on AWS: trek10.com/blog/guiding-priciples-for-building-saas-on-aws
• 3 Big Things I Wish Someone had Told Me When I Started Using AWS: dev.to/trek10inc/3-big-things-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-when-i-started-using-aws-2d0n

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rA4eVtpFnVs

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Jared Short. Hey Jared, thanks for joining me.

Jared: Hey, pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Jeremy: So you are a Senior Cloud Engineer and Developer Accelerator at Trek10, Inc. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Trek10, Inc?

Jared: Sure. So my background, I think starts similar to a lot of people, where I dabbled in the basement on the all the Apple II, I learned how to program actually from a book from the library on that Apple II. And then throughout college... Well, high school and college kept keeping up with technology and building things and exploring and learning. And eventually that led me to kind of the cloud back in 2014 or so. I was big into Docker in the early days, in the cloud, and eventually found serverless while I was at Trek10.

So Trek10 is of course an AWS consulting partner. And as part of that, I get to help companies design and build serverless and cloud-native systems, with different kind of verticals all over the world. SaaS companies, enterprise companies, all of that kind of stuff. So that's where I'm at today. And I'm mostly focused on helping people learn and understand the cloud through our developer acceleration program. So taking all of those things that I've learned while helping people build things, and now helping people just learn what all they need to learn to build successfully in the cloud.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, well, so I've been following you for a very long time. I mean, you and I have known each other now for a while. Met up at a few conferences and so forth, and you always do great stuff. So I love the Trek10 blog, love the stuff that you've been working on. You've done a lot of stuff I know with Forrest Brazeal and some other things that have been very popular. There's a whole bunch of great stuff out there by you. So definitely search for Jared Short, serverless and go check out your stuff.

But I saw an article from you a couple of weeks ago. That was the three big things I wish I knew before I started working with AWS, or something like that. And that just struck a chord with me, because as I was reading through these things, I was like, "Oh man, this was the article I wish I had when I started working with the cloud way back in 2009." And since then, it's like exploded a thousand times over. So this is a great article and I'm going to put the link in the show notes, because I do want people to go read it. But I think it'd be awesome to just go through and talk about this article and kind of hit on some of these points.

The article is very in depth that goes deep into some of these things, but this is something that really warrants a conversation. So the first point that you made, the first learning or the thing that you wanted to that you wish you had known, was this idea that AWS is just this massive ecosystem and it's basically pretty much impossible to understand all of it.

Jared: Right. Yeah. It's a massive ecosystem that shows no signs of slowing down. It's pretty similar to the ever-expanding edge of the universe, it just keeps growing and consuming.

Jeremy: It's like, S3 was the big bang and then it just kept...