Episode #27: ServerlessDays Going Global with Ant Stanley

12/16/19 • 43 min

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 Ant Stanley:

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.

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...

Previous Episode

Episode #26: re:Inventing Serverless with Chris Munns

About Chris Munns:

Chris Munns is the Senior Manager of Developer Advocacy for Serverless Applications at Amazon Web Services based in New York City. Chris works with AWS's developer customers to understand how serverless technologies can drastically change the way they think about building and running applications at potentially massive scale with minimal administration overhead. Prior to this role, Chris was the global Business Development Manager for DevOps at AWS, spent a few years as a Solutions Architect at AWS, and has held senior operations engineering posts at Etsy, Meetup, and other NYC based startups. Chris has a Bachelor of Science in Applied Networking and System Administration from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Twitter: @chrismunns
Email: [email protected]
AWS Compute Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Chris Munns. Hey Chris, thanks for being here.

Chris: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are the Senior Manager of Developer Advocacy for Serverless at AWS cloud. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what you do in that role?

Chris: For sure. Definitely. Going back to the earlier parts of my career, I started as what I guess, I would have considered a sysadmin. Maybe these days, you would call it a DevOps engineer or an SRV or something like that. I took care of servers and infrastructure, a jack of all trades across the stack below the application. Then, just a little over eight years ago, just about eight years ago, I first joined AWS solutions architect, did that for a couple years, actually went back out to a startup and then came back again. Then for the last three years, I have been a developer advocate for Serverless at AWS.

Then, just in the last year or so I've actually built out a team of people that are all over the globe. What we do as a team is we create a lot of content, we deliver a lot of content, we do a lot of interacting with our customers, trying to share the good word about Serverless and get people over the challenges and things that they are understanding the various aspects of our platform, I would say. You'll see a lot of our stuff show up in webinars, and Twitch and blog posts and in conferences, and in social media and all that stuff. I would say the next biggest part of what we do is act as a voice of the customer back to the product teams. We are embedded in the product organization, we have influence over and what product is built and to a degree, how it's built. We want to make sure that our customers, concerns, the things they're trying to solve the challenges that they have are being properly represented back to the product organization.

Jeremy: Great. All right. We are live actually in Las Vegas, we're at the Big Show, as AWS fans, I guess would call it. We're at re:Invent 2019 there have been ton of announcements so far this week and I think we're pretty much done, we've hit the max on cognitive load for the number of serverless announcements that have come out. There are a whole bunch of them that I want to talk about, and we can get into some of these in detail. There were some really great ones that I think solve a lot of customers pain points. What do you think are the biggest announcements that came out so far? Maybe not just that re:Invent, but also in the last couple of weeks? Because the last few weeks, there's been a ton of announcements as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Chris: Yeah, it's been a really hectic period for us in the serverless organization at AWS, in the last two weeks a whole bunch of things. Really, I like to boil it down to four key big things that we've launched in last couple months, announced in the last say three months that I think take on some of the biggest challenges that our customers have. The first was back in September, we announced that we were going to be changing the way that VPC networking worked for your lambda functions. We announced this new concept of what we call a VPC to VPC net, it's built on in a data based technology called Hyperplane, it's part of the advanced part of our networking stack.

As of last week, the week here before re:Invent, we got Thanksgiving here in United States, we actually finished the rollout all the public regions that we have across the globe. It's taken some time to get this rolled out. It's actually a really huge infrastructure shift, but basically what this did was it drastically lo...

Next Episode

Episode #28: Amplifying Serverless with Nader Dabit

About Nader Dabit:

Nader Dabit is a Developer Advocate at AWS Mobile working with projects like AWS AppSync and AWS Amplify. He is also the author of React Native in Action, & the editor of React Native Training & OpenGraphQL.

Twitter: @dabit3
Twitter: @AWSAmplify
AWS Amplify: aws.amazon.com/amplify
Blog: dev.to/dabit3
Github: github.com/dabit3

Transcript:

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

Nader: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You are a Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services. Why don't you tell the listeners a bit about yourself and your background, and what you do as a Senior Developer Advocate?

Nader: Yeah, sure. Before I joined AWS, I was basically a front-end engineer, mainly a mobile engineer for the last, I guess four or five years before joining AWS. I kind of come from a traditionally front-end background, but the team that I work on is the mobile team, but we cover Amplify, we cover AppSync, we also cover Device Farm and the Amplify Console. And yeah, we have a couple of developer advocates, I'm one of them. And our role is very kind of lenient in the sense that we don't really have a traditional role as someone might think of maybe a developer evangelist or something.

I think it's really team dependent on what that role actually means. But to our manager, it's a way for us to have a lot of leeway in what we do, so we can write code. Most of the stuff we do is open source so we can contribute to the open source, we can speak, we can write docs, we can write blog posts. Whatever we feel is going to contribute the most to moving everything that we're working on forward, we're able to attack that and work with that.

Jeremy: Awesome. So, speaking of things that you're trying to move forward, you mentioned AWS Amplify. Which is this really cool project that Amazon is working on. Why don't you give the listeners a 30,000 foot overview of what exactly that is?

Nader: Sure. The Amplify was first, I guess, introduced as a client SDK for web and for React Native that basically allowed you to interact with things like API Gateway, things like AWS AppSync, Cognito, much easier I guess, than some of the old way. Before you were using probably the AWS JavaScript SDK, we just added improvements that were really meant for interacting with these services from client apps. The Client was first introduced, that started game gaining steam pretty quickly.

We then introduced the CLI at the... I think the next reinvents. I think it was actually, I'm not sure exactly when the CLI was released, but it was really after to the Client. And the CLI is something that basically allows you to create AWS resources in a similar fashion as you would do with something like CloudFormation or SAM or even something like the Serverless Framework.

But it gives just a different approach, so instead of having to maybe do it in the way that you're used to doing it, maybe writing some CloudFormation or maybe writing some templates with JSON or YMAL, you can just go to the command line and create an update categories versus kind of having to know what's on with AWS.

If you're coming to AWS as a newcomer, it makes a little more sense based on the feedback that we've gotten to use Amplify, because they can say, "Hey, I want an API," and in the background we'll spin up an API Gateway and point with some configuration around a proxy to pass the event into a Lambda and we'll also generate the Lambda. It's kind of an easy entry point for people, but it also is a very helpful way to generate a couple of things at once that kind of tie together, so the CLI is another part of it.

Then there's the Console, which is something that was introduced, that re:Invent 2018, and the Console is a hosting and CI/CD platform that allows you to just kind of connect to a get-repo, and then we do the build and we deploy to CloudFront with S3. It's a really nice way to deploy your web apps. We also have a lot of stuff that's been added over the last year to improve that. I would say that's the main focus, those three things, the Command Line Interface, the hosting platform and the client libraries.

Jeremy: The purpose though of these three tools sort of working together is to build mobile applications, or web applications using something like React N...