Welcome to the Serverless-First Function Virtual Events

When you develop a serverless application, you can focus on the core features you want to build, instead of worrying about managing and operating servers, databases, or storage systems.

To simplify adoption and use of serverless technologies, we launched many new features in the last few months. For example, just to pick up a few:

• AWS Lambda introduced Provisioned Concurrency, Destinations, and updated the runtimes for Node.js, Python, Java, and .NET Core.
• Amazon API Gateway is reducing costs and latency with the new HTTP APIs.
• AWS SAM CLI simplified the deployment experience.
• AWS Step Functions now supports higher throughput workflows, and is integrated with more services such as Amazon EMR and AWS CodeBuild.
• Amazon EventBridge automated discovery and cataloging of event schemas.

To help you and your organization get the most out of the cloud, we organized a set of virtual events called the AWS Serverless-First Function:

• Last Thursday, May 21, we had the first event, Serverless for your Organization. Between an opening by Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, and closing statements by Jeff Barr, AWS VP and Chief Evangelist, we had an agenda fully packed with tips to bring the benefits of serverless to your organization, including a customer case study by Gillian McCann, Head of Cloud Engineering and AI at Workgrid Software.
• On Thursday, May 28, we have the second event, Serverless for your Application, a full day of incremental, hands-on sessions that demonstrate end-to-end best practices for building serverless applications. To start, we’ll discuss how we use serverless at AWS, and the benefits AWS teams get from adopting serverless-first. This will be followed by dive-deep sessions on topics such as security, performance, and observability. You can still register for this event here.

A Few Highlights from May 21
There were too many great moments to list them all here. If you missed the first event (or to review again some of the ideas and resources that were shared) here are my favorites:

• Dr. Werner Vogels started the event by defining modern applications, and addressing the importance of culture and adaptability when building them. These are two of the key ingredients to a serverless-first approach. He mentioned the Amazon Builders’ Library (a great resource for learning more about Amazon’s own technical journey), including multiple articles by one of the other presenters for the day, Sr. Principal Engineer, David Yanacek. He also discussed how the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s Serverless Lens (now also available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool) can help you measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement for all of your serverless applications. Among many examples mentioned during the day, you can find the journeys of iRobot and Fender to serverless-first captured in this whitepaper.
• David Richardson, VP of Serverless at AWS, discussed the importance of taking a serverless-approach when building modern applications, and covered a few of the recent launches I mentioned above that make building on serverless even better. Considerations around the total cost of ownership (TCO) were part of the discussion of many sessions, so we shared links to two whitepapers, this one by IDC and this one by Deloitte, that help companies evaluate the real impact of their technology choices and understand the long-term return on investment (ROI) of choosing a serverless-first approach.
• Adrian Cockcroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy, highlighted an array of objections to using serverless and the multiple ways in which we’ve solved for each of them. He paired these solutions with insightful sessions delivered at re:Invent last year, including Serverless at scale: Design patterns and optimizations and Moving to event-driven architectures. He also discussed “relics” from the past… There are indeed ways to migrate an IBM mainframe to microservices on AWS Lambda and to refactor a U.S. Department of Defense mainframe to AWS!
• Gillian McCann, Head of Cloud Engineering and AI at Workgrid Software, delivered a compelling behind-the-scenes story of Workgrid Software’s learnings, challenges, and successes using a serverless-first approach. I enjoy real-life customer stories, they are a great way to learn and, for us at AWS, to get feedback.

Watch (Again) and Join Us on May 28
It was great seeing all the great questions, answers, and content being shared via the live chat. You can watch (or re-watch) the sessions from May 21 on-demand here on Twitch.

You’re still in time to join us for the second event on May 28! You can find the full agenda and register here.

— Danilo