The Cloudcast #244 - Engineers, Coffee and AWS Lambda

Aaron and Brian talk with Donnie Flood (@floodfx) and Larry Ogrodnek (@ogrodnek) about their podcast @EngineersCoffee, their experience at Bizo, and their fascination with serverless computing (or events-based computing) with “Will it Lambda?”

Show Sponsors:

• This show sponsored by Intel Cloud For All
• Get a free book from O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount on all books

Show Links:

• Engineers and Coffee Podcast
• Bizo sold to LinkedIn
• AWS Lambda

Topic 1 - Officially you are both formerly with a company called Bizo. Can you give us some of your background and the types of things you’ve built?

Topic 2 - We found your show because of a tweet about AWS Lambda, which we’re both really fascinated about lately. Did you start your show to talk about Lambda, or was that just coincidentally the first topic?

Topic 3 - What about Lambda is interesting to you guys?

Topic 4 - Help us understand the basics of Lambda. There’s lots of tutorials and books online, but it would be great to talk through some example that you have dealt with. Maybe you’re “Will it Lambda?” Concept.

Topic 5 - We’re seeing all the large cloud providers offer an events-based (serverless) offering now - Google Functions, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk. Some are making them open-source. What do you see as the big areas that need additional work? Do you see this taking off of being a niche?

Topic 6 - We’re seeing all the large cloud providers offer an events-based (serverless) offering now - Google Functions, Azure Functions, IBM has a service in BlueMix. Some are making them open-source. What do you see as the big areas that need additional work? Do you see this taking off of being a niche?

Topic 7 - On your show, Donnie has mentioned many times his affinity to using more and more AWS services - sort of this “eliminate all the unnecessary lifting, focus on going fast” mentality. How did that come about, and do you think it’s applicable to non-startup companies?

Topic 8 - We've talked a lot about Lambda, but what other areas are you guys really interested in these days?

The Cloudcast #242 - Understanding Serverless Applications

Aaron and Brian talk with Joe Emison (@JoeEmison; Founder and Chief Technology Officer @ BuildFax) about building a digital business, the challenges of platforms, and why he’s moving more applications to serverless computing.

Show Links:

• This show sponsored byIntel Cloud For All
• Get a free bookfrom O'Reilly media or use promo code PCBW for a discount on all books
• Joe’s Company - BuildFax
• Joe’s writings - The New Stack
• Why AWS isn’t Winning and it Poses Problems
• Joe’s Blog - InformationWeek
• Building Serverless Applications - Interop 2016

Serverless References:

• AWS Lambda

• IBM OpenWhisk

• Google Functions

• Serverless Code - Ryan Brown
• Serverless Framework (open source)

• WebTask

• StackHut

Topic 1 - Let’s talk about your background. We like to have builders on the show, but you actually help real builders.

Topic 2 - You’re giving a 4hr talk at Interop in May about “Building Serverless Applications”. Let’s start with the basics of Serverless - why does it exist, what problem does it fix? what is it, what does it do?

Topic 3 - Let’s talk about some of the existing serverless “services” out there and how they work. What works, work needs to evolve, how do they work with other services?

Topic 4 - Does software exist today to have these serverless capabilities on-premises, or is this just a public cloud capability today?

Topic 5 - You mentioned in a Twitter thread earlier this week that there are multiple services that are “better than AWS Lambda today”. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?