The Cloudcast #317 - The State of the Serverless Ecosystem

Brian talks with Ryan Brown (@ryan_sb, Sr. Software Engineer @Ansible, Author of ServerlessCode) about the overall state of the Serverless community after the recent ServerlessConf 2017 NYC, the breadth of focus areas for developers and business, the ways to integrate serverless into existing applications, and areas for newbies to the space to get started.

Show Links:

• ServerlessCode
• Managing Serverless Framework with Ansible
• Slides from Ryan's talk
• Ben Kehoe’s “DiffOps”
• [PODCAST] @PodCTL - Containers | Kubernetes -  RSS Feed, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn and all your favorite podcast players
• [A CLOUD GURU] Get The Cloudcast Alexa Skill
• [A CLOUD GURU] DISCOUNT: Serverless for Beginners (only $15 instead of $29)
• [A CLOUD GURU] FREE: Alexa Development for Absolute Beginners
• [FREE] eBook from O'Reilly

Show Notes:

Topic 1 - You’ve been heavily involved in Serverless since the very days, working on things like the ServerlessCode site as a side project. How are you seeing the community evolve?

• The DevOps crowd was there

Lots of “is it NoOps or Not?” discussions

• Nobody is actually NoOps. There’s a common understanding (underlined by people like Charity Majors) that someone in your org is always responsible for stuff working, or else you die. 
• DiffOps is one term that encompasses the “you have responsibility, but one of your responsibilities is to farm out as much as is reasonable to your provider” 

Any viable open-source elements emerging?

• Lots of toy-ish “oh you can run FaaS on k8s” around, but when you get serious: 
• Serverless Framework/Zappa/Sparta/Apex 
• OpenWhisk 

Some VC funding, but nothing massive yet

• IOPipe raised at least one round 
• Serverless has a spot in the HeavyBit, and some funding 
• Stackery has about 2 million in funding 
• The real “VC’s” in serverless tooling are the cloud mega-providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) and the biggest teams I know of are all subteams there 

How many customers vs. vendors at the event?

• Basically 2x the first ServerlessConf, up to 450/460 attendees 

Topic 2 - You gave a talk called “Harmonizing Serverless and Traditional Applications“. Outside of greenfield companies, that seems to be the common questions that companies are asking. What topics did you cover in your talk?

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