Andreas Grimm is IAM & Serverless Architect and Developer Advocate at Akelius Residential Property AB. He’s an expert in Identity & Access Management and a proponent of serverless/serviceful architectures. Being aware of the fact that having a shared understanding with the business is even more important than technical solutions, he’s into approaches like Domain-Driven Design and EventStorming. Importantly, he’s from the community for the community and organizes meetup groups in Berlin like Domain Drive Design Berlin, Fullstack JS, and Serverless Berlin.
We spoke to Andreas about all things serverless and the challenges of running meetup groups in Berlin.
How do you explain the growing interest in serverless?
According to Andreas, there’s a number of contributing factors:
” The first is money, obviously. So there’s this thing that you can pay less with the technical part of serverless.” This is part of Function as a service (FaaS), a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app.
As Andreas notes, “If you don’t use it, you don’t pay for it. But also, if you have a successful product and you need to scale and you have a lot of traffic, then it’s also easier to pay more. So before there were things that money can’t buy, and now with a serverless technique, you can throw more money on top of it and have more performance out of the system.”
Then, there’s the fun part of discovery for curious developers who enjoy a challenge. As Andreas notes, ” Because it’s this technically new thing, this part of serverless. It’s fun again to, to use a new technique. And that’s what we as developers also like new frameworks, new tools, the new shiny thing to try that out.”
According to Andreas, “When I think about serverless, it’s actually about people. It’s not really about the technical part because in the end, it’s developing software and creating software products, the technical side is solved. It’s not the problem anymore to implement the solutions technically, it’s more about talking to people and finding out what is the right problem, what is value? And then in the end that might sound familiar to you, we’re back to what agile DevOps was all about, is delivering value to the user and finding out what is the value?”
Andreas’ recommended Serverless resources
Serverless Chats: a podcast designed to geek out on everything serverless. Each week, Jeremy Daly, serverless advocate, AWS Serverless Hero, and Off-by-none founder, chats with another serverless champion to explore and do a deep-dive into specific topics in the serverless space
Running Serverless by Gojko Adzic: An introduction to AWS Lambda and the Serverless Application Model: This book will help you get started with AWS Lambda and the Serverless Application Model. Lambda is Amazon’s engine for running event-driven functions, and SAM is an open-source toolkit that greatly simplifies deploying Lambda services. Together, they make it easy to create auto-scaling APIs and cloud services designed for serverless…
Off-by-none: A Serverless Newsletter
Andreas notes that AWS also has some very good videos. There’s also Microsoft’s Azure Functions resources, which include videos, documentation and training.
Connect with your local serverless community
According to Andreas, “There’s a lot of good meetups, like, for example, here in Berlin, the Serverless Meetup Berlin. There are the Serverless Days conferences now in more and more cities, which is a community conference over a day where you can hear a lot of great talks about serverless. But also meet the community and meet the speakers. Everyone’s friendly, and it’s very happy to share their knowledge with beginners in that topic.”
According to Andreas, the challenges of running a meetup is time “finding the time to talk to speakers, and just set up the thing.” He advises that an as organiser of three meetups, “Just be open for help. That proved to be, I would say one of the biggest improvements or relief.”
Community management resources from Codemotion
COVID-19 emergency: A Community Manager’s Diary
A six-part (and counting) series: Francisco Picolini, Codemotion’s Community Manager, shares his personal experience and advice on how to cope with and adapt to working from home during COVID-19 emergency lockdown.
The best tools to Start and Manage a Community
One of the typical New Year’s wishes from Community Managers is to finally find the best tool to organise and arrange their community. There aren’t magic bullets, and usually, Community Managers rely too much on what it can be called “natural selection”, instead of looking for useful community management tools.
How to reach a wider audience for your tech community using Social networks
Managing a community includes a lot of things, from writing articles to promoting a new feature or release, to make all members comfortable and safe. But what happens when we are trying to improve our social presence? Are we going in the right direction? Are we reaching the intended audience? Are we using all the resources we can?
18 Tips to run a good tech meetup
Do you want to run a great tech meetup? Have no idea where to start? In this article, you’ll learn 18 tips to organize it in a proper way.
Postman demonstrates the power of community engagement
Tech company Postman is an example of how engaged users can not only be customers and service users but part of a bigger community of people dedicated to approve and drive the company’s products forward continually. The only complete API development environment, they have a community of 10 million developers and over 500K companies using their comprehensive set of built-in tools to support every stage of the API lifecycle. With Postman, you can design, mock, debug, test, document, monitor, and publish your APIs all in one place.
Ladies That UX Creates a Vital Space for Women in Tech:
Ladies that UX creates a space for women to meet up to support each other, push the UX boundaries, and promote female skill and talent. We speak with Lucija Sicenica, one of the organisers, who also works as an Experience Researcher at GameDuel.