What the Dumb Tiger Wants to Share: February 2018

2018-02-26

2018-02-17

Serverless computing is the new hype - no operations, no need to pay for idle resources, "infinite" scalability and a high level of reliability and availability ... sounds nice! So, that's worth a conference: JeffConf Hamburg took place at the Altonaer Museum.

Here's a short rundown of the talks - for each talk Malwine created awesome sketchnotes!

Why the Fuss about Serverless? by Simon Wardley. An absolutely entertaining talk about building business strategies, the fallacies and situational awareness maps introducing the five factors of Sun Tzu's strategy cycle and John Boyd's OODA loop. I love his business strategy generator, but it scares me, how familiar those strategy statements are ... The evolution of the situational awareness map for IT systems is a really good visualization where serverless enters the playground. (Sketchnotes)
You shall not FaaS! by Manu Rink. "Serverless is a software engineering pattern." It won't solve all your problems with system complexity - choose your weapons wisely, e.g. consider execution time/frequency and memory need. (Sketchnotes)
Real-Time Serverless Back Ends with GraphQL by Danilo Poccia. A quick introduction into GraphQL and a presentation of an implementation using AWS Lambda and AWS AppSync. (Sketchnotes)
Using the Event Gateway to build serverless multi-cloud applications by Philipp Müns. An introduction into the motivation behind the idea of the Event Gateway: building a central hub to integrate services from different providers. The people behind the Event Gateway are the creators of the Serverless Framework, which enables provider agnostic (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, Apache OpenWhisk etc.) development and deployment of serverless applications. (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-02-20: Added link to slides.]
Serverless Data Warehousing & Data Analysis on AWS by Alex Casalboni. A presentation of an example architecture leveraging AWS services, but also mentioning known gotchas. The code to deploy the shown architecture is available here. (Sketchnotes)
Conversational AI and Serverless by Gillian Armstrong. A talk about implementing a chatbot using Amazon Lex and Amazon Alexa and the lessons learned (intent mapping in natural language processing; lambdas are quick to develop; think early about scalability and monitoring; responses in a conversation have to be fast, and therefore cold starts matter). (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
How to sell serverless to your colleagues by Subbu Allamaraju. "Simplify and then automate." (Sketchnotes)
Serverless Machine Learning by Oliver Zeigermann. How to leverage existing machine learning services in the cloud with Google Cloud Platform examples (sentiment analysis, face detection). If you need to train a custom model, use free software (e.g. TensorFlow). Deployment of models into managed clouds is easy nowadays. (Sketchnotes)
Evolutionary Serverless Architecture: From hackathon to product by Michael Wittig. A well-structured talk about the evolution of a serverless architecture for a chatbot. Start as simple as possible (automate deployment, add monitoring, don't optimize). Evolve architecture over time (analyze monitoring, optimize where necessary, decouple). (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
Rule-based dispatching of events to a serverless services armada by Daniel Buchholz. An introduction into an architecture to ingest events with different schemas based on specific rules. (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
Gotchas in Serverless Framework by Anna Doubková. A detailed talk about the traps one can step into with the Serverless Framework and how to deal with it. (Sketchnotes)
Live Coding: A Serverless Platform in 100 lines by Cyle Riggs. A cool coding session showing how to implement a serverless platform in less than 100 lines of Python code. (Sketchnotes)
Managing Serverless Development by Paul Johnston. A presentation of common use cases for serverless applications. (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
Putting the F in FaaS: Functional Composition in a Serverless World by Lars Trieloff. A stirring promotion of Clojure. (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
Serverless Wordpress by Arto Liukkonen. Introduced an architecture based on Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda and Amazon Lightsail to address traffic spikes. (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
Intro to Fn: Open Source Cloud Agnostic Serverless Platform by Chad Arimura. Fn Project is a very interesting serverless platform based on containers that can be run anywhere. (Sketchnotes) [Update 2018-03-13: Added link to slides.]
Serverless in production, an experience report by Yan Cui. A very interesting talk about migrating an existing software system to AWS Lambda packed with tips and tricks. (Sketchnotes are not available yet - I'll update here when they are.)