JeffConf #2 - Milano

by Alex Ellis

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:

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.

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.

Here are a few Tweets shared about OpenFaaS:

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.

OpenFaaS JeffConf 2017 - Milan from Alex Ellis

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

So Give it a shot!

How the Demo works

  • A web hook is sent to the FanClub function by GitHub

  • Your photo is downloaded and uploaded into an S3 bucket

  • 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.

  • Demo source-code

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: