We are just off the back of ServerlesssDays Belfast, which was a great event. So we figured we’d chat about that. ServerlessDays Belfast was on the 28th of February. And I’m one of the organisers. It’s a volunteer, community, and not-for-profit event. We had a bunch of sponsors: AWS, Bazaarvoice, EverQuote, G-P, Instil, and LibertyIT. Our organisers are me, Gillian Armstrong, Garth Gilmour, Peter Farrell, Julie Sherlock, and Treasa Anderson. We had a good group of organisers. It’s the second time we had the event. The first one was in 2020.
We had 12 speakers, and over 260 attendees from over 40 companies. It was a great day. And it was nice to see everyone. But most excitingly we had it at the Game of Thrones Studios Tour. So the location was different and it was good fun. It was a lot of work organising it, but we’re pretty happy as an organising team that it all went well. We had feedback on a few things, which you always get. But people were pretty happy with the day. I was there on organiser duty. You were both there on sponsor duty. What did you think of the day?
Networking and space for conversation
Michael O’Reilly
It was an awesome day with a lot packed into it. With regards to the location, I had never been before. So it was awesome. It added to the excitement and buzz. I thought the calibre of speakers was really high. So kudos to you Dave, the organisers, and obviously the speakers for coming along. There were lots of awesome talks. I thought there were lots of good breaks in between, the tour. And what I liked about it was being able to visit the other stands. And meeting people and having side conversations. As well as talking to engineers from other companies under different contexts and understanding where they’re at. There was a lot of time for that, even though it was a one-day event.
Mark McCann
It was super, really well organised, and a great venue. As you said, the speakers were tremendous. And in regards to those side conversations, there was space for that to happen. It wasn’t boom, boom, boom, talk after talk. And Serverless Espresso was there as well, which was great to see in action. We’ve done some of the workshops, and we’ve read about them so seeing it in action was really good. The theme of the day was the reality of building teams and organisations delivering serverless.
Maturity of serverless conversations
And you can see that the maturity of conversations has been elevated over the last number of years. We are much more into building more extensive systems, socio-technical aspects, and best practices for organisations and using serverless to change your ways of working and your culture. So you can see a lot of that coming through. And you see from the talks, what a junior person’s review of serverless is. That journey is a lot easier than it was four or five years ago. There were different contexts and personas to get out of the day. You can see that it’s not a fad or a passing thing. This way of operating and thinking is delivering value rapidly. And a well-architected serverless first way is definitely here to stay. And the penny is dropping with a lot of organisations this is the way to deliver value quickly.
The Reality and Fantasy of Serverless, Building Serverless Teams and Making it Real
Dave Anderson
The theme was ‘The Reality and Fantasy of Serverless, Building Serverless Teams and Making it Real’. Phil Le-Brun, who is the Director of the Enterprise Strategy Team for AWS, was over. And he speaks to a lot of C-Levels about the Cloud. So it was a really nice opportunity to have him launch the event. And give us a perspective of what he sees when he is speaking to the leaders of the industry. He says that only 5-10% of workloads are in the cloud. And of those workloads, only a minority are serverless. So he says that the attendees in the room are the tip of the spear. And this is the way things are going. And to embrace it and keep pushing. So it was a really good message. He was there as himself, as it wasn’t an AWS event. And he was being honest. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it. So it was great to hear his expert analysis of what is happening.
Michael O’Reilly
I thought it was a really surprising number. I’d never come across that before, believe it or not. It’s interesting thinking about the executives and leaders in organisations and whether they have enough understanding of technology in order to make decisions. He gave us good insights there too, which added a different dimension. And that’s what we get into in ‘The Value Flywheel Effect‘ book.
The Value Flywheel Effect
Mark McCann
IT Revolution was very generous to sponsor and provide 250 of ‘The Value Flywheel Effect’ books. So all attendees got a copy of the book. It was a bit surreal for us as authors. And we got a couple of shout-outs which was really great. And I think, it’s great that many attendees are going to read the book. Even at our work calls colleagues have been holding up the book. It’s great that it’s going to resonate. So I’m very interested to see how that percolates through organisations as well. As they start to grasp the flywheel effect for their own organisations.
Dave Anderson
It was very generous of IT Revolution. And just so people know, it wasn’t planned. I mentioned to IT Revolution during one of our sync calls, that we were running this event. And they asked: ‘Do you want some books?’. I replied: ‘No, don’t worry about it’. But they insisted that we take a bunch of books. And it turned out to be 250 books.
Mark McCann
And the book was quoted in three or four different talks. And we had not prompted them to. But Julian Wood and Sheen Brisals quoted the book in their talks. It was very nice and humbling to see these leaders referencing the stuff that we’ve done.
ServerlessDays Belfast Speaker Lineup
Dave Anderson
Severlessdays Belfast is a community technology event. So no one says anything they don’t have to! Julian Wood gave the Keynote. Even though he works for AWS as a Serverless Developer Advocate, he gave his opinion on where he sees the industry. So that was interesting. But I thought that paired really nicely with Mattie Wilson from Instil. He gave a brilliant talk on an engineering team going through the journey from a cloud application to a serverless application. It was a brilliant talk. I thought those two talks kicked the day off really well.
Michael O’Reilly
I really enjoyed Mattie Wilson. Mark, you made the point earlier that it’s not a fad. It feels like serverless is over the hype cycle. The team were seeing it as an option and a choice. And looking at it in terms of the problems they were going after. He took us through that journey and his ‘stroll approach’, which I thought was really good. I really enjoyed that talk. I thought that was really strong.
Dave Anderson
What I picked up from him was the fact they were building a serverless application meant that there was a lot of stuff they didn’t have to do. They could focus on the higher-level stuff. So that was interesting.
Well-architected thinking and approach
Mark McCann
You could see, even if they didn’t call it out, their well-architected thinking. Which a lot of these organisations are starting to do now. Because they’re not worried about servers and capacity. They are well-architected in their approach. I loved that he had empirical data from when he surveyed the team about what they thought if they went back and started again. We all love a bit of data. So it was great to see survey data.
Dave Anderson
Sheen Brisals from The LEGO Group, as ever, gave an absolutely brilliant talk about Lego’s journey. Going Serverless to EDA and the team topologies of an event-driven organisation. Sheen is an absolute master.
Mark McCann
It was good to get different perspectives Jonah Andersson did a talk on the .NET stack. And Conall Bennett and Roger Moore did a talk on CME Group’s move to a Google tech stack. But a lot of the same principles and ways of working and thinking were present in all of those talks whether it was AWS, Google, or Azure.
Removing the myths around scale and serverless
Michael O’Reilly
We focus on traditional, enterprise work, due to our experience and backgrounds. And then you hear from people from different contexts or industries who apply serverless to their problems. I thought that was really insightful. Craig McCarter talked about large-scale serverless. And I took comfort from hearing about a team that’s doing something financially significant at a massive scale. They’re pushing those limits. And you’re seeing the scale they’re getting to, which removes the myths around scale and serverless.
Mark McCann
Business-critical workloads are now being run through serverless. Five or six years ago, people would have been very hesitant to do so.
Michael O’Reilly
If there’s one story that’s going to smash enterprise myths around serverless it’s that one. I thought that was awesome.
Dave Anderson
If I remember the start of that project, it was not a low-risk project. It was a very ambitious project. So that was great by Craig McCarter. And I really enjoyed the talk by Anna Carlin and Emma Patton from Aflac Northern Ireland. They called their talk: ‘A rookie journey of discovery and learning’. So they came in as grads and basically built a serverless system. I thought they were really good.
Serverless is permeating far and wide
And Chintan Parmar’s Dunelm story was fascinating about Dunelm’s ecommerce site because it’s quite an unknown story. The thing I’d like about Chintan is that he was really keen to get that story out. They had done brilliant work during the lockdown, but they hadn’t got a chance to share the story. So it was one of the first times that the Dunelm story was shared. Most people had no idea that they had a whole big serverless ecommerce site.
Mark McCann
Those types of stories show how far and wide the serverless way of working and approach is starting to permeate. Dunelm, who I wouldn’t have thought of as being an advanced technical organisation, really nailed it.
Dave Anderson
Ben Ellerby from Aleios closed out with his Serverless Staircase Framework. I’ve been a fan of Ben’s for many years. He’s an AWS Hero. He’s brilliant and very experienced. And he’s worked on a lot of serverless projects. That is what his company does. So he’s got lots of war stories from doing this with real customers.
Mark McCann
Those collaborative facilitated practices were good. How do you bring teams and organisations on that journey? I think there are a lot of organisations that need to think about that aspect as they start to adopt cloud and serverless.
Decompressing on the Game of Thrones Studios Tour
Dave Anderson
In the middle of the day, we brought everyone on the Game of Thrones Studios Tour. We will not give away any of the reveals or surprises. But there were two hours for attendees to go through the tour and see all the sets where Game of Thrones scenes was actually filmed. The props and sets are still there. Because this was the actual filming location. That blew people’s minds because it’s a relatively new facility. So many people hadn’t been through it before. But what was nice about it was that it gave attendees space and time to walk around and chat with each other. It was almost like an open space. It was nice for attendees to get to do it and decompress and meet people they hadn’t seen for a long time.
Mark McCann
It was great. And we were on the G-P stand as well. Attendees were coming in and chatting about what they were doing. And also the book and just their own experiences. You could see the maturity from people who were talking about chapters. And not just about getting started. They were talking about what they had tried and more about the organisational dynamics and socio-technical stuff that comes along as you start to transform. So really great conversations. And as you said, it was like an ‘open space’ in disguise as there was space for conversation, as people were able to talk about interesting topics and things that were pertinent to them.
Michael O’Reilly
I have started back on Season One of Game of Thrones. So I am at Episode 3!
Strength of the local tech community
Dave Anderson
It was a good, impactful today. I definitely felt there was great representation from lots of companies. And it showed the strength of the local community with cutting-edge practices to build valuable applications. Not just fiddling about with low-level stuff. So it was great to see the journey that lots of people are on.
Mark McCann
You can see from 3 years ago when we last had ServerlessDays Belfast that there has been momentum. And there are more companies that are embracing this. It’s going to go from strength to strength as more and more organisations adopt a serverless first mindset and approach. It’s what Phil Le-Brun said, at the start of the day, we’re at the tip of the spear here. But I think it’s going to evolve rapidly. And what we’ve seen is lots of cool expertise being built in the community.
The Goal of ServerlessDays Belfast
And one of the intents was to enable and empower each other and talk about our journeys so that they can help each other. That goal was definitely achieved for the day.
Dave Anderson
We want to get people. We have lots of engineers, working for different companies. But at the same time, we’re trying to do the same stuff. So why not help each other? It’s not a competition.
Michael O’Reilly
There are lots of good topics, surfacing and emerging at these community events, and for upcoming meetups and talks.
Dave Anderson
That’s a good point. There will be more meetups to come so keep your eyes peeled. But that’s the craic. Have a look at ServerlessDaysBelfast.com to see the agenda etc. The videos of the talks will be out in the next few weeks. And there are lots of nice tie-ins to TheServerlessEdge.com blog and @ServerlessEdge on Twitter. So have a look and subscribe to our channels. Thanks very much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai