Symphonia's Serverless Insights — October 2017

Symphonia
Symphonia
Oct 27, 2017

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

News from the Serverless World

The biggest update from the industry is that we had another global gathering of Serverless enthusiasts here in New York City for the 5th ServerlessConf, ably produced by our friends at A Cloud Guru. The previous get-together in Austin was only 6 months ago, but with Serverless being as nascent as it is a lot can happen in half a year. We were excited to be part of the schedule, giving a workshop on Serverless Security in AWS, as well as John giving a talk on ‘Mostly Serverless’.

Amazon and Microsoft were the big attractions, of course. Chris Munns from AWS managed to sneak in some pre-re:Invent news with the announcement of traffic shifting for Lambda aliases. Microsoft had a fabulous demo from Donna Malayeri combining a whole bunch of awesome Azure Functions features — running a Java Azure Function, locally, on a Mac, debugging with a breakpoint, triggered from a remote event source in the Azure cloud. Amazing. This used Azure's new early-access release of Azure Functions for .NET Core .

A large theme of the conference for us was that of moving out of ‘hey, this is useful!’ mode to ‘how do we use this at scale, for real?’ A lot of talks had content about operations, tooling, and the like, because (a) this stuff is important when we go beyond a small project and (b) a lot of Serverless tooling is still comparatively immature. It's in a better state than it was a year ago, true, but we're still often getting cuts from the bleeding edge.

O'Reilly's Velocity conference in London happened last week, and had a track dedicated to Serverless (including a talk on Serverless Data Pipelines by your editor!), which speaks to the growing impact on the larger industry.

AWS announced per-second billing for EC2. Of course, that's not Serverless, but it does bring EC2 closer to Lambda's billing policy, and for certain types of work may make EC2 more appropriate than Lambda (remember folk, at Symphonia we're all about hybrid architectures.)

The biggest AWS Serverless news of the year will occur in 5 weeks’ time, when Andy and Werner roll-out the reInvent truck of announcements. We'll talk about what we're most excited about from Las Vegas in our next issue.

Read / Watch / Follow

Read: Getting around Lambda's 50MB artifact limit, and more, as the BBC Evaluate TensorFlow Models in AWS Lambda.

Watch: ServerlessConf videos, as soon as they are released!

Follow: Subscribe to Last week in AWS. Because it's hilarious. And useful.

News from the Symphonia World

To start with, and carrying on the reInvent thread, John and Mike will both be speaking in Las Vegas. John will be speaking on AWS Lambda and the JVM and Mike on Serverless and Organizational Effectiveness . By the time you read this though both talks will likely be booked up. Because Serverless.

We have two new articles for you since last time we wrote:

On the video side of things a couple of new updates from conferences earlier in the year:

We're also excited to have our first client testimonials, which you can read on our web site. One of these was from SingleStone, with whom we were excited to give a two day Serverless Masterclass. If that's something that could help your team too then drop us a line.

One more thing

It wouldn't be a ServerlessConf without Tim Wagner destroying some poor unsuspecting servers. This time he had pre-destroyed some 1U boxen, turning them into art.

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.