Symphonia's Serverless Insights — August 2017

Symphonia
Symphonia
Aug 24, 2017

This is the latest edition of our newsletter. To receive the email version please subscribe here.

News from the Serverless World

It's been an interesting old summer. Serverless continues to ascend the adoption curve, which is great, but it does bring the concern that we may fall into a trough-of-disillusionment at any moment. My hope is that the container folks drop into it first, and Serverless can dodge away from their path (only kidding containeristas — we love you too!)

While AWS evolve their multitude of Serverless offerings, with aspects like Lambda@Edge going GA, and local testing with SAM Local, Microsoft are full steam ahead on adding features and components, such as Azure Event Hubs. We're also very excited about Microsoft's upcoming port of Azure Functions to .NET Core, allowing development from Mac and Linux environments. And Google? Well, where are Google? Some folks are saying they're in trouble on the Serverless front. Our opinion? We're not counting them out yet, especially if you're already a big GCP user. But if you're on the fence about cloud vendors, and want to go large on Serverless, you really have 2 main options at the moment. And the crew from Mountain View ain't one of them.

If you want a different tack on a comparison of the Big 3's approach to Serverless, here's a great, and in-depth, “Serverless Shootout” by Matt Billock.

As we head into September we are looking forward to the fall conference season. Serverless Conf is returning to New York City, in October. This is still the conference for all things Serverless, with great representation from across from the industry. And then the behemoth that is AWS re:Invent is in late November, with preparations already well under-way. Symphonia will be at both, of course, and we look forward to seeing you at one or the other. And if you happen to be in Florida in December we'll be speaking at Arch Conf too!

Read / Watch / Follow

Read: Public & Cross-account Functions on AWS Lambda, by Erica Windisch at IO Pipe.

Watch: Confusion In The Land Of The Serverless, a usefully skeptical look from “Mr. Microservices” Sam Newman.

Follow: Marcia Villalba has an extensive collection of hands-on Serverless development videos on YouTube. She's also on Twitter.

News from the Symphonia World

Our biggest news is that we are excited to announce our video training series with Pearson is now available — AWS Lambda: Developing Serverless Applications with Java. This is available to anyone with a subscription to Safari. From the overview:

More than 3.5 hours of practical video instruction on AWS Lambda …. The aim throughout this course is not to give you just cookie cutter examples but instead to give you a thorough understanding of the Lambda platform and programming model, so you'll have confidence building your own Serverless applications.

We're super happy with how this came out, and know it will be a great resource for you and your teams. Read more here.

If you're interested in other forms of training we have a number of workshop structures available to super-charge your team. And we'll also be giving more conference-located training this year too at both O'Reilly's Software Architecture Conference in London on October 18 and 19, and at their Software Architecture Training sessions in New York on October 29 and 30. These are both 2-day immersion masterclasses, and not to be missed!

John and Mike have been traveling across the US, from California to South Carolina, for our consulting clients. We're continuing the transcontinental trend this coming month, stretching our activities from Washington to Virginia.

Did you download our O'Reilly report, “What is Serverless?" , yet? Yes? Great!

We have a whole bunch of other updates for you too:

One more thing

We were excited to make our first conference sponsorship this month — for the Write/Speak/Code conference in Oregon. Neither of us were in attendance, however, since this an event dedicated to empowering women software developers to become thought leaders, conference speakers, and open source contributors, a cause we are passionate about.

Closing out

Thanks for reading our latest newsletter, and we trust you found something useful here. We continue to enjoy your suggestions for improvements and additions for future issues.

Our mission at Symphonia is to bring the benefits of Serverless and the Cloud to both our clients and the industry at large. Drop us a line at johnandmike@symphonia.io to chat about how we might help you, or just to share ideas how the Cloud is helping your team, and your business.