Ahead in the Clouds

Serverless apps are everywhere these days, but how do you get started? How do you decide which provider to go with? I have created the same Python based app with 3 services, AWS, Google Cloud & Microsoft Azure. I will go over the highlights and lowlights, and how to judge what’s right for your project.

My goal for creating this app was to answer these questions. What services are available for which languages, but especially Python? How fast can I get to coding? How do I programmatically define the infrastructure? How do I test everything? How is their CI/CD pipeline? How do I secure the app? How can I monitor what is going on?

During my research I ran into a common problem. There are guides on how to use the UI to create samples. There is technical documentation that will give you the name of the flag you are looking for. There is rarely a user story to help you go from nothing to a running application. My user story is that I wanted an endpoint that allows you to add data to persistent storage, get, edit and delete that data. Seems straightforward, but there is a steep learning curve that had me tearing my hair out. This talk is not just to give you a better understanding of serverless offerings, but to keep you from getting discouraged at the inevitable blockers. At the end of this talk you’ll walk out with the confidence to create your first serverless microservice and smash any walls you hit along the way.