ServerlessConf Tokyo: we attended ServerlessConf Tokyo on Oct 1st and it’s been an exciting time to be in Japan, thanks to more than 300 developers and engineers who showed their passion for serverless technologies. Not to mention of complementary events before and after the main conference.
Serverless is changing how solutions architects think of app development worldwide.
The first ServerlessConf in NYC took place just four months ago and the community keeps growing every day. If ServerlessConf NYC was the hottest conference of this year, ServerlessConf Tokyo has been the most international one, featuring speakers from Japan, US, Europe, and more, despite most of the attendees being from Japan. I haven’t learned much Japanese myself in only seven days, but I promise I will do better next time.
ServerlessConf & much more
Thanks to the impressive dedication of the organizer (Shingo Yoshida, founder of Section-9), the conference hosted excellent speakers from AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and many agencies and startups focused on Serverless.
The series of events also included two serverless meetups (in Tokyo and Osaka), a serverless zombie workshop by AWS and a special workshop focused on Serverless Machine Learning by Cloud Academy.
I attended the conference on Oct 1st, where I talked about how to build and deploy machine learning models with Serverless. Given the increasing interest in this topic, we decided to organize an additional workshop on Oct 4th. This workshop was meant to contextualize and explain the main concepts of machine learning, how you can leverage Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS), and the fascinating benefits of deploying machine learning models into the Cloud with AWS Lambda.
The fantastic location was pretty crowded and very well organized. I had a chance to meet plenty of smart and passionate developers, who already work with AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk or Google Cloud Functions.
Keynote by Olivier Klein
The keynote – titled Go Serverless, compute only when it matters! – was given by Olivier Klein, Solutions Architect at AWS.
Olivier introduced the advantages of working with microservices, with respect to the traditional monolithic architecture. By focusing on AWS Lambda, he illustrated the main best practices as far as versioning, staging, caching, etc. He also showcased three illuminating demos about serverless web apps, social media integrations (Facebook & Slack) and Amazon Echo.
Here you can find the official presentation:
Cloud Academy @ ServerlessConf Tokyo
We attended the first official event in Osaka on Sep 29th, where we learned about many interesting serverless projects such as Shifter (Serverless WordPress), and how AWS users are developing serverless applications using Scala.
On Oct 1st, I attended the main conference and talked about how Cloud Academy built a multi-model Machine Learning Serverless architecture on AWS. We recently discussed the same architectural solution on Jeff Barr’s blog.
Here you can find my presentation:
On Oct 4th, I was happy to join a special group of serverless aficionados in Tokyo. I discussed what problems can Machine Learning solve for you and what are the main challenges in the world of Big Data, focusing on the two main solutions offered by Cloud computing: Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) and Serverless Machine Learning.
Here you can find my presentation:
What is coming next?
The next upcoming event will be ServerlessConf London, later this month. The long list of speakers and workshops has been announced already, and the agenda looks very promising.
Let us know if you are attending and if you’d like to learn more about Serverless.
