Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts! I recently had the incredible opportunity to attend Serverless Days events in both Bengaluru and Ahmedabad and it was an awesome experience. From insightful keynotes to engaging sessions, and some networking during tea & lunch breaks, I'm here to share my notes from these two fantastic gatherings.

Bengaluru Serverless Days - A Day Packed with Innovation

Keynote Address

Serverless Days Bengaluru started with Sindhu's keynote setting the tone for an exciting day ahead, emphasizing the importance of serverless computing in today's tech landscape.

Serverless Computing with SAP Kyma

Maheswara delved into serverless computing with SAP Kyma. His session showcased how businesses can harness the power of serverless to streamline their operations and drive innovation.

The Value Flywheel Effect

David and Shilpa shared their insights into creating a "Value Flywheel Effect" at G-P. Their session explored how serverless technologies can create a virtuous cycle of innovation and value creation. He brought in interesting aspects of the North Star Framework, the clarity of purpose, and how capabilities should be built in Event Driven Architecture.

Demystifying Event-Driven Architectures on AWS

Nishant and Anand took the stage to demystify event-driven architectures on AWS. Their examples of synchronous and asynchronous ways of completing an order in restaurants helped relate to the power of orchestration and workflows in serverless. They went over the pub-sub models, choreography between domains, and circuit breaker mechanisms in tightly coupled synchronous architectures.

Supercharging User Experience with Lambda Response Streaming

Sandeep showcased how serverless can supercharge user experiences with improved performance and reduced bounce rates. His presentation highlighted the practical applications of serverless technologies in enhancing customer interactions. He also shared about Lambda Response Streaming which was released in April 2023 and the new invocation pattern with really impressive TTFB (time to first byte).

Thriving with AWS Serverless Ecosystem

Dhaval provided valuable insights on how early-stage startups can thrive using the AWS Serverless Ecosystem. He took us through the concepts of serverless, its applications, with relatable examples of why adopting Serverless could be a win owing to it cost efficiency, in-built scalability, and speed of development so that developers can focus mainly on core business functionalities. His expertise left the audience inspired and motivated.

Achieving Cloud-Agnostic Nirvana

Giri shared how event-driven architecture can be a game-changer in achieving cloud-agnostic solutions. His session introduced us to new possibilities in the serverless world.

Building Resilient and Scalable Serverless Apps

Akshay talked about the 3-factor Architecture Pattern for building resilient and scalable serverless applications, which comprises of the following 3 factors:

1. Realtime GraphQL

2. Reliable eventing

3. Async serverless

Panel Discussion with Serverless Heroes

The afternoon brought an exciting panel discussion with Dhaval, Prashanth, Srushith, and Jones with Jeevan moderating and posing some really interesting questions. Their discussion shed light on the challenges and opportunities in the serverless realm.

Serverless Apps and Transactional SQL Databases

Charanraj and Rahil delved into the optimal usage of serverless apps and transactional SQL databases. Their insights about client-side pooling and server-side pooling were quite useful. They shared some tips on effective SQL, how to improve query performance, interactability with the databases, transaction contention, and serialization isolation.

Serverless: Beyond Functions

Anchit and Manish took us beyond the basics of serverless, exploring its vast potential and applications. It was a dive at Cloud Functions, a FaaS, function as a service and Cloud Run, containerized app as a service - both powered by KNative which are useful for monitoring, logging, tracing and health checks.

End to End Data Governance with AWS Serverless

Ankit enlightened us on achieving end-to-end data governance using AWS serverless stack. He spoke about the AWS Lake Formation, a managed service that makes it easy to build, secure, and manage data lakes where LF tags could be used for data classification and maintaining data quality with AWS Glue ETL service.

Ahmedabad Serverless Days - Unveiling the Future

Welcome Speech & Keynote Kicking Off with Enthusiasm

Ankit set the stage in Ahmedabad with a warm welcome speech. His words resonated with the audience, creating an atmosphere of excitement. Prashanth's keynote was inspiring as he took us through his journey in the Serverless world!

Thinking Asynchronously: AWS Event-Driven Architecture

Hitesh showcased the power of thinking asynchronously and building a serverless event-driven architecture on AWS.

Building Serverless ML Applications

Joinal Ahmed dived into the world of serverless machine learning applications. He took us through the various advantages that Serverless brings in like Scalability, Reduced Overhead, Streamlined Maintainance, Easy Integration, and Real-time inference.

Sponsor Talk & Activity Time

Prashanth's shared a glimpse of how folks at Antstack have fun on their days out. It was a joy to watch them, watch the video to know more!

Jaymit shared about the offerings from Serverless Guru and how they empower businesses to understand and adopt Serverless.

We had an interesting activity time where we were asked to guess the movie from which the displayed meme/scene was from and memorize the final math expression values. We had 5 of those and whoever had the right answers got some amazing goodies!

Monitoring Serverless Environments with Elastic Observability

Ashish educated us on monitoring serverless environments effectively. His talk took us through Elastic Search platform and how it can be used for observability and reliability in serverless applications. He shared the practical uses of serverless monitoring helping improve latency, preventing cold stars, monitoring usage, and identifying invocation errors.

Proactive Ops: Event Driven IT Operations

Dave's was one of the most amusing talks of the day. He shared insights into proactive operations through event-driven IT. His session provided a fresh perspective on IT management.

Demystifying Serverless Security on AWS

Vishwas peeled the layers on serverless security with a focus on AWS. His insights taught a way for a secure serverless journey which was coupled with a relatable use-case. He highlighted the differences between AWS Secrets Manager and AWS SSM Parameter store and when to use what while securing secrets and configuring them. He shared more on methods of attack prevention and monitoring which was informative.

Innovate Faster with AWS Serverless

Jaymit emphasized how AWS serverless accelerates data strategies. His session was packed with different architectural patterns which was fast-paced and felt like a quick breeze that I hope to catch up on once the slides are made available to us.

Thriving with AWS Serverless Ecosystem

Dhaval shared his wisdom on thriving with the AWS Serverless Ecosystem for early-stage startups, their challenges and the choices they should optimally take based on their use-case, in similar lines to his talk in the Bengaluru Serverless Days but most of the content was different and not as repetitive as I had assumed it would be.

Building an Event-Driven System with Azure Functions

Aashirwad explored the world of Azure Functions and Azure IoT Hub for building event-driven systems.

Panel Discussion: The Future of Serverless

Nilesh, Chirag, and Meghal Shah engaged in a stimulating panel discussion, providing diverse perspectives on the future of serverless technology which was moderated by Ankit.

Giveaway Contest and Closing Note

The day concluded with a thrilling giveaway contest, adding another element of excitement to the event. Loved the Quiz questions which were a quick test to see how much we had learned through the day.
I scored 7/10, with 17th place, and the top scorer got all the answers right!

Summing it up - Serverless Days left us inspired and motivated to continue on our exploration towards Serverless.

Conclusion

Both the Bengaluru and Ahmedabad Serverless Days were a ride through the world of Serverless Technology. I left with a wealth of knowledge, a network of like-minded individuals, and an immense sense of excitement for the future of serverless!💡🚀

Stay tuned for more exciting tech adventures!