Technological innovation cannot be separated from continuous and ongoing learning: case studies, interviews, and discussions are important opportunities to draw inspiration from what is happening in Italy and around the world and to enrich one’s cultural background with valuable information and knowledge.
That’s why we at Viasky always participate with great enthusiasm in industry events that we find interesting and constructive. We recently took part in Serverless Day Milan; here are some highlights from the talks we attended.
Productized Patterns: Exploring the Next Evolution of Serverless
By Jeremy Daly @ Ampt
It was a presentation introducing a specific type of pattern for serverless computing that goes beyond the simple copy-and-paste approach often taken by https://serverlessland.com/patterns to ensure that everything adapts based on the type of environment. Development environments require different pricing than production environments, and this new type of pattern (currently in development) aims to address that need.
Serverless in Action: The Technological Goals Achieved by the Real-Time Sports Results Platform By Emanuel Russo, Daniel De Gaspari @ NTT DATA
NTT presented a case study conducted for Sky’s website in the live events section. They transitioned from a monolithic architecture—in which the widgets to be displayed on the site were provided by third-party vendors—to a fully serverless architecture where the widgets have a time-to-live and are generated internally. The bulk of the work involved collecting a large volume of “near real-time” events and making them immediately available to users. Another challenge was being able to have different widgets displaying the same data—or, conversely, the same widgets displaying different data. This was achieved by separating the data collection logic—using dedicated pipelines—from the on-demand widget creation logic.
Supercharge Lambda Functions with AWS Powertools
By Raphael Manke @ codecentric AG
It was a talk to present the features of the library https://aws.amazon.com/it/blogs/opensource/simplifying-serverlessbest-practices-with-lambda-powertools/, which is very useful for tracing logs and metrics and for implementing so-called “idempotent” functions—that is, functions that are “safe” for business logic, meaning they can be retried with the same parameters.
Developing Serverless Java Solutions Like a Boss
By Marko Djakovic @ BVNK
A talk that demonstrated that even Java can be competitive in the serverless world thanks to Snapstart: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/snapstart.html
Should you bet on serverless as an early-stage startup (or a new team with big ambitions)?
By Louis Pinsard @ Dialog
A speech by a young founder of an AI (LLM) startup, in which he highlighted the pros and cons of thinking of a startup as a serverless service from the very beginning—especially in his case, where development timelines were extremely tight.
The Art of Embracing Failure
By Anahit Pogosova @ Solita
The speaker recounted a disastrous failure that occurred while she was consulting for a major data broker. It seemed impossible to resolve the issue until it became clear that the problem lay in the standard AWS configurations. All of this served to introduce the concept that timeouts and retries are the best “friends” of a serverless architecture because they allow you to immediately tell if something is going wrong.
Serverless Architecture as an Enabler for Low-Code Solutions
By Daniele Frasca, Roman Boiko @ ProSiebenSat.1 + AWS Serverless Days Milan 3
They told us how serverless has recently been becoming almost no-code, relying much more on off-the-shelf services rather than rewriting business logic from scratch.
Now that serverless has come of age, what's next?
By Eric Johnson @ AWS
In his closing remarks, Eric Johnson—an AWS developer advocate—shared his vision for the future of serverless computing. The idea is that we are moving toward a “service-full” paradigm—one in which we will no longer rely on Lambda functions or computing in general, but rather on a chain of interconnected services that create added value.
