After a lengthy hiatus, the Serverless Zürich Meetup group has restarted regular operations. The group has been led by Murat Celep of Redhat and we have jumped in to help out.
The first meeting in the reboot of Serverless Zürich took place in ZHAW, Lagerstrasse in late September – it was attended by an audience which was modest in size but very engaged. There were two talks – one by Szilveszter Farkas of Rackspace who went through their experience automating deployment and management of serverless functions on AWS Lambda and one by yours truly on scaling serverless functions on Open Source platforms.
Szilvester was first up and he covered how they developed their own tools and frameworks initially but ultimately ended up working with more widely adopted tools, Terraform in particular: in their defence, when they started looking at this space, the supports for serverless management in widely used tools was very rudimentary and did not meet their requirements – a classical challenge associated with embracing new technologies early in their adoption. Szilveszter also gave a nice overview of the range of tools in the serverless space – mainly around AWS Lambda – that they think are interesting.
Next up, I gave a talk which had a very different focus: the focus was on Open Source serverless solutions and, in particular, how activity on a message bus can be linked to instantiation of functions. I did a small demo of the work that we’re doing in which we’re linking up databases and filestores to serverless platforms and instantiating functions based on activity on a Kafka bus. We’re using the KEDA framework for this and we’re interested in exploring some of its dynamics.
Slides for both talks are linked to in the comments on the Meetup page here.
Our objective is to run these events more regularly – probably every 2/3 months and cover different aspects of the serverless space, ranging from experience reports to best practices to new platforms and technologies. We hope to offer compelling content over the next 6 months to build up the momentum within a community around this exciting and high-potential technology.
Watch this space!