Serverlessconf London is happening October 26-28, 2016 at etc.venues, 200 Aldersgate, St. Paul’s, London, EC1A 4HD. The event kicks off Wed., Oct. 26 with a full day of workshops. The conference and talks take place Oct. 27-28. Early bird registration is still available for a limited time and starts at £395. Find full information, including speakers, at london.serverlessconf.io. Then purchase your tickets via https://serverlessconf-lo
Serverless Inc. is excited to lead a workshop and talk, plus connect with a global community of serverless enthusiasts at Serverlessconf London in October. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Serverlessconf co-founder Peter Sbarski about his vision for the event and what attendees can expect next month in London.
What’s the history of Serverlessconf?
We at A Cloud Guru launched the first Serverlessconf in New York City, May 26-27, 2016. We had two main reasons for organizing the event:
We created our own online learning management platform with a serverless approach and did it very quickly. Having built the first version of the platform, we realized that this was a new, viable way to create scalable, robust, and high-performance systems (we used AWS Lambda & API Gateway, Firebase, Auth0 and other great services). We felt that we needed to share our experience, but also learn what other people had built.
We also felt that there was a growing interest in serverless technologies and architectures in the community. We saw it through the proliferation of projects, frameworks and libraries, blog posts, quora questions, and books. So we decided to try to bring people together to discuss what serverless is, and how things can be built with it.
Serverlessconf NYC was a fantastic event. Hashtag #serverless trended at #1 or #2 in NYC throughout the event and we witnessed a lot of passion and camaraderie from everyone who attended. There were a few unforgettable moments like Tim Wagner, GM of Lambda at AWS, destroying a (fake) server using a baseball bat during his keynote. Everyone left the conference with a lot to think about and we’ve only seen passion for this area of tech grow further. By the way, videos of Serverlessconf NYC are available to view on our platform (http://acloud.guru).
What’s your vision for Serverlessconf London and Serverlessconf in general?
Serverlessconf is a community event. It’s for enthusiasts, IT professionals, companies, and vendors wanting to learn, discuss, and push forward serverless technologies and architectures.
It’s for anyone wanting to discuss Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) tech like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk or Google Cloud Functions; and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) services like Firebase, Auth0, and Algolia. It’s for developers and solution architects wanting to talk about serverless architectures and figure out what best-practice looks like.
Our vision is to make Serverlessconf the world’s largest event for serverless (FaaS & BaaS) enthusiasts and to help create a strong, passionate, supportive, and welcoming community.
What can people expect from the conference?
Serverlessconf London is going to be held at a fantastic venue and feature a large number of brilliant talks. We are likely to double, if not triple, the number of talks we had in NYC. Serverlessconf is technology neutral so there will be talks on technologies and services built by Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and other companies. There will be case-studies and stories of personal experience. We’ll talk about frameworks and best-practice when it comes to architecting large, scalable systems. And, undoubtably, we will have talks about pressing issues such as DevOps in a serverless world.
There will be something for everyone at Serverlessconf regardless of expertise and knowledge. We are also hoping for interesting announcements from vendors. Attendees will be able to meet the teams that are directly responsible for technologies they use today. They will be able to ask questions and, hopefully, grab a few goodies from our large exhibition area. Serverless Inc. will, of course, have a presence too, so if you want to ask Florian Motlik, CTO of Serverless Inc., questions, this will be your chance!
Are you noticing any trends in the talk submissions as far as topics people are interested in?
We are definitely identifying interesting trends in topics as people submit talks. There are talks about operations in a serverless world and how to best leverage serverless technologies in complex scenarios (such as an offline world). There are many talks on building and scaling systems with AWS Lambda and Azure.
We’ve had talk submissions on how to: replace costly monolithic systems and architect systems to scale; build payment systems and replace expensive ETL pipelines; create massive IoT systems and introduce serverless technologies to large enterprises. We’ve had at least three times the number of talks submitted for London as we did in NYC. And we’re still getting new submissions every day.
What are some topics you personally are excited to share/learn about at Serverlessconf London?
I’m personally looking forward to user stories at Serverlessconf London. A lot of people have now had a chance to build large serverless systems so I’d like to hear what they have learned. I’d love to discuss the pros and cons of serverless applications; talk about how to evolve architectures and make serverless as ubiquitous and accessible to developers and solution architects as possible. There are a number of speakers returning from Serverlessconf NYC that I can’t wait to hear from again.
Is there anything else you’re looking for right now?
Serverlessconf is a community event, so we always welcome volunteers. We greatly appreciate whenever people donate their time to help grow the community. If you’d like to volunteer and assist at the event, get in touch with us at hello@serverlessconf.io.
Sponsors are also welcome to contact us. Our sponsors get great benefits such as an ability to exhibit their products directly to customers, find new leads, and interact with the community. At the same time, their support helps us put on the conference and grow the community.
Any other info you want to share about Serverlessconf London?
We’re excited to run Serverlessconf London because there is so much passion and interest in this area. Serverless technologies and architectures are still relatively new, so everyone has a chance to become a pioneer and make a difference. I’m convinced that at Serverlessconf London we’re going to hear from brilliant technologists, make new discoveries, debate, and walk away just a little bit smarter and a little more inspired.
Enter the code serverlessrocks at checkout to receive a 20% discount on registration – including early bird tickets. We’ll see you in London!
Also published on Medium.
