Ciao Milano e @jeffconf ! pic.twitter.com/AqjKVZWAvu
— Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) September 29, 2017
This was the second JeffConf event held in Milan, Italy. I travelled out with my wife who was attending her first tech conference. While in Milan we had a chance to meet up with one of the core project contributors John Mccabe.
Paul Johnston the co-founder of JeffConf opened the conference with a explanation of the name Jeff:
The name was actually a bit of a joke, we didn't intend for it to go this far, but the name Jeff it meant to mean Serverless. We may change it, what do you think?
Paul also gave his personal definition of Serverless shaped by 10 years of AWS and Lambda usage:
.@PaulDJohnston breaking things while talking Jeff and taking jokes too far... #jeffconf #serverless pic.twitter.com/i9WGNx9vrJ
— JeffConf (@jeffconf) September 29, 2017
The talks
We were invited to a speakers' dinner the night before where it became clear that most of the other speakers had not used Docker outside of AWS EC2 or ECS. The primary experience of Serverless was through the lens of AWS Lambda. During the day we had talks primarily from cloud vendors around AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions.
Serverless demo by Microsoft evangelista. Very cool demos today! @jeffconf pic.twitter.com/gyx0OiTA6C
— Alex Ellis (@alexellisuk) September 29, 2017
The talks and demos were very cool - most of them were presented in Italian which made it harder for us to follow as English speakers. The demos were very good though and it's great to see that Serverless has global movement.
I can't wait to see something OPEN like #openfaas after so many vendors solutions : )
— Federico Minzoni (@fminzoni) September 29, 2017
Here are a few Tweets shared about OpenFaaS:
OpenFaaS framework that allows you to package code or container as #Serverless function w/ @alexellisuk cc/ @jeffconf @open_faas #JeffConf pic.twitter.com/ja8nh69v3V
— Matteo Zuccon (@matteo_zuccon) September 29, 2017
The @open_faas framework on stage now with @alexellisuk here in Milan at @jeffconf pic.twitter.com/5zET7U7Ljz
— John McCabe (@mccabejohn) September 29, 2017
Now @alexellisuk showing OpenFaas ... shameless plug check out also https://t.co/SKPJQA88ZN #JeffConf #Serverless pic.twitter.com/mvyn0oGzeF
— realbot (@realrealbot) September 29, 2017
Grab the extended slides:
I adapted the presentation to focus on demos and fundamentals rather than digging deeper into topics like asynchronous functions and third-party back-ends.
The extended slides have additional links to demos and samples.
Bonus demo
As the event was running a little late there wasn't time to show the final demo - you can take part in the bonus demo for a limited time.
Log into GitHub.com then head over to the OpenFaaS repo and click Star.
In a few moments you'll see your photo uploaded in the style of a polaroid by my Twitter bot alexellisuk_bot
Xel is a star-gazer for OpenFaaS pic.twitter.com/NkgtRofpBc
— Alex the Bot (@alexellisuk_bot) September 29, 2017
So Give it a shot!
How the Demo works
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A web hook is sent to the FanClub function by GitHub
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Your photo is downloaded and uploaded into an S3 bucket
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A second function runs with the name of the file in the S3 bucket - it applies the Polaroid effect using a separate function then uploads it to Twitter.
So how is OpenFaaS different from a cloud function?
- Can run in the cloud, on your laptop or in your datacenter
- Can run any Windows or Linux binary as a function
- Supports long timeouts in excess of 5 minutes
- You can hack on the framework and be part of its future
Find out more and get started below:
Get started
It was great to be part of JeffConf and we're still hearing the afternoon talks, so keep a look out for Tweets on #jeffconf
Here are a few ways to get started: