Kishore Bhatia discusses with Nate Taggart about Serverless. Topics include: understanding the motivations for this computing model, deep dive learning about Serverless architecture, development frameworks and tools. Learn from Nate’s experience with Serverless paradigm developing Operations tools at Stackery and find out various approaches, challenges and best practices for architecting and building Serverless applications.

See how to use IBM Cloud Functions to make the most of serverless computing. Doug Tidwell shows you how to generate code that manages a cloud-hosted NoSQL database.

Panel:

Charles Max Wood 

Aimee Knight

AJ O’Neal

Joe Eames 

Special Guests: Gareth McCumskey

In this episode, JavaScript Jabber speaks with Gareth McCumskey about Serverless For JavaScript. Gareth leads the dev team at Expat Explore in Cape Town, South Africa. Gareth and this team specialize in exploring the Serverless realm in JavaScript. The JavaScript Jabbers panel and Gareth discuss the many different types of serverless systems, and when to implement them, how serverless system work, and when to go in the direction of using Serverless. 

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• What does it mean to be Serverless? 
• Since platform as a service.
• Microservice on Docker 
• Firebase
• “no backend” 
• Backend systems 
• Cloud functions and failure in systems 
• How do you start to think about a serverless system? 
• How do decide what to do?
• AWS Lambda 
• Working in a different vendor
• Node 4 
• Programming JS to deploy 
• Using libraries for NPM
• How is works with AWS Lambda
• Where is the database?
• More point of failure? 
• Calls to Slack?
• Authentication
• Micro Services
• Elastic Bean Stalk
• Static Assets, S3, Managing
• Testing the services 
• Integration testing
• And much more! 

Links:

• @garethmcc
• @expatexplore
• gareth.mccumskey.com
• https://github.com/garethmcc
• serverless.com

Picks:

Aimee

• Serverless Architectures 
• NG-BE Conference 

AJ

• Documentary on Enron
• Hard Thing about Hard Things 

Charles

• Serverless Framework
• The Storm Light Achieves 
• Avengers: Infinity War

Gareth

• Building MicroServices 
• Skeptics Guide To The Universe Podcast
• Expate Explore 

Joe 

• Wonder -  Movie
• Gloom In Space - Board Game 

Sponsors

• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• Linode
• CacheFly

Panel

• Charles Max Wood
• Aimee Knight
• AJ O’Neal
• Aaron Frost
• Joe Eames

Joined by Special Guest: Gareth McCumskey

Summary

Gareth McCumskey introduces JAMstack and serverless. He goes into great detail on how it works. Aimee Knight and Aaron Frost voice their concerns about going serverless. Aimee thinks it feels dirty. Aaron has concerns about the code, is it actually easier, what use cases would he use it for, and does it actually save money. Gareth addresses these concerns and the rest of the panel considers the positive and negatives of using JAMstack and serverless. Charles Max Wood asks for specific use cases; Gareth supplies many uses cases and the benefits that each of these cases.

Links

• http://herodev.com/
• https://thinkster.io/
• https://jamstack.org/
• https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch
• https://expatexplore.com/
• https://serverless.com/
• https://www.cloud66.com/
• https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
• https://twitter.com/garethmcc
• https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber
• https://twitter.com/JSJabber

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Join the mailing list
• Watch out for new podcasts
• Send me defunct podcasts you love chuck@devchat.tv

Aimee Knight:

• Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management.
• Quest Nutrition Protein Bars

AJ O’Neal:

• Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy by Nobuo Uematsu
• Legend Of Zelda Concert 2018 Original Soundtrack by Never Land Orchestra  
• How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Jay Geier  

Aaron Frost:

• The Go-Giver, Expanded Edition: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

Gareth McCumskey:

• https://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/
• Steam Play on Linux

Joe Eames:

• Expanding your horizons
• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages
• Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks: Languages That Are Shaping the Future
• https://elm-lang.org/

Sponsors

• Sentry– use the code “devchat” for $100 credit 

Panel

• Charles Max Wood

• AJ O’Neal

• Joe Eames

• Aimee Knight

With Special Guest: Evan Weaver

Episode Summary

Evan Weaver is the CEO and cofounder of FaunaDB, a serverless database and a great way to get started with GraphQL. Evan talks about what went into building the FaunaDB and his background with Twitter. FaunaDB arose from trying to fix Twitter’s scalability issues, and the panel discusses scalability issues encountered in both large and small companies. They talk about the difference between transient and persistent data. They discuss how to develop locally when using a serverless database and the importance of knowing why you’re using something. Evan talks about how developing locally works with FaunaDB. He addresses concerns that people might have about using FaunaDB since it is not backed by a tech giant. Evan talks about some of the services FaunaDB offers and talks about the flexibility of its tools. He talks about how to get started with FaunaDB and what the authentication is like. Finally, Evan talks about some well known companies that are using FaunaDB and what they are doing with it. 

Links

• FaunaDB

• GraphQL

• Netlify

• AWS Lambda

• Apollo.io

• SQL

• Jamstack 

• Akkeris

• Graphile

Follow DevChat on Facebook and Twitter

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Captain Sonar

• Canny

• JSJ Reccomendations

Aimee Knight:

• Falling in Reverse

Joe Eames:

• Battlestations

Evan Weaver

• Forza Motorsport

• Follow Evan on Twitter and Github @evan

Burke Holland works for Microsoft on the Azure team in developer relations. He starts the show talking about how he got started in serverless. He’s careful to note that just because things are marketed as serverless doesn’t always make them so. In order for something to be serverless, it must be sufficiently abstracted in terms of technology, only require payment for what is used, and infinitely scalable. He talks about the statelessness of serverless, and the panel discusses what it means to be stateless. Burke reminds listeners that serverless is not for long-lived operations, but there are features in serverless providers that can help you get around this. Burke talks about how writing serverless code differs from standard or previous coding approaches and practices. He advises that serverless functions are best kept small, and talks about how to fit them in with other kinds of APIs. 

The panelists talk about the multi-cloud and why people would want to be on multiple cloud servers. Burke talks about what Microsoft has done with Serverless Frameworks to accomplish multi-cloud compatibility. The JavaScript experts discuss the advantages and disadvantages of picking JavaScript over other languages, and Burke talks about why he prefers TypeScript and the Easy-Off feature. They talk about speed on a serverless platform, especially concerning the cold start time, which Azure is relentlessly trying to lower. He does talk about some things that can be done to decrease load time and about premium functions. The panel discusses how to debug serverless functions and tools that are available, such as the Azure Functions extension. 

They talk about ways to set up more secure functions to keep things from racking up charges. Burke talks about some things Microsoft does internally to control cloud costs, such as sending monthly reports with reminders to delete and using tools like Azure Reaper to delete short-lived projects. Azure can also put spending caps on subscriptions, but when you hit that cap you can’t serve any more requests. Burke concludes by saying that most of the time, going serverless is a lower-cost way to improve productivity, and because it’s event-driven, it allows you to tie into things that you’re already doing in the cloud. Serverless almost always justifies itself from an ease of use point of view and a cost point of view. 

Panelists

• Aimee Knight

• Steve Edwards

• Dan Shapir

• AJ O’Neal

• Charles Max Wood

Guest

• Burke Holland

Sponsors

• G2i

• Split

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Links

• Microsoft Azure

• Swagger

• GraphQL

• Kong

• Serverless Frameworks

• TypeScript

• Serverless Doesn’t Have to Be an Infuriating Black Box

• Azure Functions

• CosmoDB

• Is Serverless Really as Cheap as Everyone Claims?

• Azure Reaper

Picks

Steve Edwards:

• Louis L'Amour books, especially The Lonesome Gods

• Ultra Sabers Azure Reaper

Burke Holland:

• Follow Burke on Github

Dan Shapir:

• Taking a vacation

AJ O’Neal:

• Hello World by Hannah Fry

• Ikea Kallax

Charles Max Wood:

• The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job

• Buy Me a Coffee

• Devchat is looking for show hosts and sponsors!