(upbeat music)
>> From The Regency Center in San Francisco,
it's theCUBE covering Serverlessconf San Francisco 2018.
Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage
of Serverlessconf 2018 here in San Francisco.
Our second year doing the program
and happy to welcome back to the program Sam Kroonenburg
who is the CEO and founder,
the guy that built A Cloud Guru.
>> That's right. >> The company behind
this Serverlessconf show.
So, thanks so much for joining me,
and we really appreciate that we could be here
as a media partner.
>> Thanks Stuart, thanks for coming on.
It's been great, the conference has been great so far
and it's great to have you here.
>> Yeah, so Serverless one of those technologies
we've been talking about for a few years,
super exciting, a lot of energy,
and I feel like it's translating in the show,
good buzz to the show.
I hear about 500 people so,
compare and contrast for us a year ago to today.
>> Yeah, there's huge energy here,
this is the biggest turnout that we've had to date,
we started this two years ago in 2016,
and I think we had a couple of hundred people.
Mostly at that time, it was the vendors.
It was like Amazon, Google, Microsoft
and then some enthusiasts.
I think last year
we started seeing more of the tooling companies,
the startups around the serverless space starting to come in
and this year it's just exploded.
I mean if you have a look and you walk around
and see the sponsor booths, its just this explosion
of new tooling companies, that I guess are doing value-adds
on top of what the vendors are doing.
Like security, monitoring, there's a whole range of them.
>> And Sam, you were one of the first companies I talked to
where it was like, oh okay, this technology that just
allows me to spend a few weeks in the basement,
building a company
that just totally changed the economics
of how you build a company and how you deliver a service
to users.
>> Yeah absolutely, I built the original school
in four weeks, locked myself in a bedroom,
and because I built it serverless,
not only was it cheap to run
but it scaled incredibly easily,
I didn't have the operational overheads,
I didn't have to worry, what if we get a spike in traffic
in the middle of the night while I'm asleep
when we didn't have a lot of staff.
And it allowed us to move quickly early on,
which was fantastic.
So there was a lot of rapid development,
test and feedback cycles.
But interestingly now, I find one of the biggest
differentiators for us is the cost, the cost is so low.
We do six and a half million LAMDA invocations every day,
1.8 million API requests and we pay 550 dollars a month
for compute, for the entire business,
650 thousand customers.
>> I mean, game-changing on the economics.
>> That is game-changing, that is orders of magnitude.
So it's yeah, incredible.
>> A Cloud Guru as a company has expanded quite a bit,
its not just AWS anymore.
Its beyond, tell us a little bit about the company,
and give us your viewpoint about serverless overall,
cause it's much more than just LAMDA today.
>> Yeah for sure, so the company as a whole,
we've grown like crazy, its been great, we've expanded out.
We're in Austin Texas now, in the UK and in Australia.
We're a lot more focused on other clouds as well.
We've just released our first Google certification courses,
we got a few Google courses, a whole bunch of Azure courses,
and we're seeing a lot of demand within our customer base
and enterprises that we work with to go multi-cloud.
And I think the serverless space
is kind of a little bit by nature
more vendor-agnostic than the generic cloud-computing space,
its easier for companies to architect across clouds.
>> I'd love for you to dig into that a little bit for us
because most of the people I talk to,
its pretty much dominated by LAMDA today
and some of the other services that AWS have.
>> Yeah that is correct.
>> Are you finding people that are doing
serverless multi-cloud?
>> There are some. >> There was just
an announcement on that K-native stuff
we're all trying to dig into so,
what do you see on the non-Amazon serverless front?
>> I think everyone has their preference,
so we are mostly built on AWS
but we use Firebase as well, and we use Google-Vision.
And i think because when you build serverless
you are building against
managed services effectively with API's.
But you can build against a manage service in AWS
and hit it's API or you can hit one in Google, right?
You've got that kind of boundary around the system,
so I think it's a little bit easier just by its very nature
of being really, you're building,
architecting on a set of managed services.
But I would say most companies are still focused
on particular clouds.
But I just mean by nature it's a little easier
to build multi-cloud.
>> So you mentioned a couple of other services you're using,
the thing I want to ask you is,
so many times in technology it's like
oh, when you're a startup you can do the latest and greatest
cool new thing.
>> Yeah.
and you build on LAMDA, and then two or three years later,
wait, it's changed and therefore,
I architected something differently,
so give us your viewpoint as an architect
as to how things have changed, does using serverless
allow you to kind of be on the new thing easier
than if I had built on servers?
>> I'm actually talking about this in my talk tomorrow,
and that's, I think one of the big advantages of serverless
is that you can change your architecture over time
much more easily.
So when I built the platform originally,
I built a monolith, it was a serverless monolith.
There was like a whole bunch of functions
reading to and writing from the same database,
and just highly coupled.
And it was just this big kind of beast.
Over time as we brought on development teams
that didn't work anymore,
they needed to be able to specialize in different areas,
so we changed to a micro-services architecture.
We did that incrementally over time
but we changed our entire architecture
without ever once having to think about infrastructure,
we didn't have to think about what's the load balances,
how's the web farm going to work, how am I going to auto scale.
Infrastructure wasn't an issue so changing our architecture
is just a matter of changing a YAML file,
change the configuration file, hit deploy,
cloud formation deals with it.
So I think it gives it that flexibility.
>> Yeah, it's great, for years I used to talk about it,
well when you build your infrastructure
what version of OS do you have, what gear do you have,
and if you go to AWS or Azure GCP
you don't say what version are you running on,
because you're running on whatever they had.
>> That's it.
>> But even in traditional infrastructure as a service,
it's not what version you're running on
but its like oh wait, I have this compute instance,
and now there's these new versions out,
and how do I move and change,
and there's tooling to help with that,
but it sounds like you're saying
with serverless and microservices it makes that even easier.
>> Well even with the typical cloud,
let's say instance based EC2 based cloud,
you know if you want to introduce a new microservice
you got to be thinking about, what's my entry point,
how am I going to load balance it,
how am I going to set up my autoscaling?
We just don't have to have those conversations,
you know it's going to scale, just expose an API endpoint
or a LAMDA function and just invoke it.
And I think, who was it?
Rob from Nordstrom is doing a talk of From 1 to N.
with serverless, what works for one invocation,
works for a million invocations, it just scales from 1 to N
without any change in architecture.
I think that's really compelling.
>> That's the whole scale thing we've been talking about.
But really, it does.
Talk a little bit about scaling,
you gave some stats as to scaling your business,
you don't run into any limits or issues or spikes?
>> I think over time we've occasionally contacted AWS
to increase concurrent execution limits
and some of that stuff but, you know,
you can pre-plan that, see that coming
and talk to them about it.
But we used to have to worry about write and read throughput
on DynamoDB and now and now they have autoscaling
and we don't have to worry about that,
so I think a lot of those constraints that were there
in the AWS infrastructure are changing now too.
So, yeah, it's something we have to do very very rarely.
>> Any commentary on the maturing space of serverless
as to any limits that have been lifted,
not just in LAMDA but in general,
or things that you are looking forward to in the future
that might expand some of the use-cases
or allow things to grow even faster?
>> I think obvious things like SQS-LAMDA integration is great
to finally have it, so there's some things that
everyone was just waiting for, kind of pre-existing things.
I think what's most interesting to me,
I get the vendors will keep innovating,
they'll keep making us faster and more scalable,
and tooling around that to make it easier to develop.
We did an executive summit yesterday,
prior to the conference, and one of the things that really
resonated to me in that summit was when you're a developer,
a developer's entire experience of serverless
is the dev experience.
That's kind of all they see,
they're not in the backend infrastructure
worrying about monitoring the servers
and all that kind of stuff,
so they're not looking so much at the ops.
So their experience of serverless is the dev experience.
So, I think,
starting to see the vendors focus on dev-tooling
and having SAM local on that is really great to see
cause that's improving experiences for developers,
but I think the thing that excites me more than
what the vendors are doing,
is what the startup ecosystem is doing.
In the say, security space, monitoring/management,
I know Serverless INC just announced their new product
for the Serverless platform for deployment,
so I get a little bit more excited about that.
>> And the other thing is, of course,
users that are doing cool and interesting things,
I noticed how you mentioned Nordstroms is representing,
I've heard them on podcasts before,
I had FENDER on today talking about
how serverless helps them on the application.
I had the people at serverless.com
talking about how even in marketing and content
serverless can help them.
Are there any other
cool and interesting stories you can share?
>> Yeah, I've seen Expedia are doing a lot
in the serverless space now, they're doing a lot there.
Another one, even NETFLIX, NETFLIX aren't using,
from my understanding they're not using public cloud,
that they've rolled their own.
But they're using the same architectural
principals and practices, so they have their own
function as a service system built internally.
So it's interesting to see the same patterns applied
outside of public cloud where it may not
make sense for them as a business
to be running particular things in AWS.
So yeah I think there's a range.
>> Alright Sam, I want to give you the final words,
takeaways from the show and what to look forward
from A Cloud Guru in the future.
>> Yeah, we got a whole lot more AWS content coming,
a lot more labs and a lot more
Google and Azure content coming,
so you should see a lot more really cool content from us.
A lot more focus, our focus now is a lot on
training teams at scale and enterprises,
so we do a lot of work with large enterprises
on helping them transform their talent.
So we're doing a lot of work on that,
and yeah I think tomorrow the Serverlessconf show,
we got Simon Wardley.
I'm talking, so of course, that will be amazing (laughs).
No we got some really good, Lynda Nichols from Cloud Rage
this afternoon, so I'm excited,
we're going to see a lot of cool content.
>> Well, once again Sam I really appreciate you
and the partnership, bringing theCUBE here
for the second year and congrats, great community here.
>> Yeah, thank you.
>> Always a pleasure to catch up with you.
>> Yeah, and thank you for supporting us.
>> Sam Kroonenburg, I'm Stu Miniman,
and be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the content,
for shows in the past as well as
where we'll be in the future.
Reach out to us if there's a show we should be at
that you don't see on the list.
For the whole crew here, most of them,
the Palo Alto and San Francisco based.
I'm an east coast guy but happen to be in the area.
Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.