A Walk on the Hype Curve with Serverless

GOTO Chicago 2018

“Oh my! Serverless! I’ve seen this everywhere.” “Haven’t you heard?! Nobody maintains servers anymore! Ew.” “Serverless is finally the silver bullet software has been waiting for!!!” “Isn’t it just a wrapper around Cloudformation? Huh.” “This thing has more warts than a bucket of toads...no wonder Amazon stopped supporting it” “Well, but it’s a lot better sometimes” “Wow. This makes deploying super straight forward.” “Yeah, tying everything together is pretty thoughtless.” “Cool, so serverless is a good choice for some subset of problems. But not everything ever.”

Technologists often walk the complete hype cycle for a technology. At Spantree, we recently adopted serverless architectures for several client and internal projects. We’ve seen the highs, and lived the lows. Walk with us as we drink the kool aid, realize it’s just colorful sugar-water, then enjoy a refreshing drink on a nice spring day as we kick back and get things done with serverless. We’ll show off a not-so-toyish toy that integrates Auth0, DynamoDB, AWS Lambda and API Gateway. Through the lens of this journey, we’ll also share our process of identifying, evaluating, and adopting new technologies at Spantree.