28 Serverless Gurus and experts One Must Follow in 2021
Serverless is a constantly evolving space with something new being discovered every day. Being a relatively newer field, developers and enterprises are constantly learning how Serverless can be made easy and the adoption of Serverless technology can be made faster.
For the benefit of such learners, we have put together a list of 30 Serverless Experts that any Serverless enthusiast must look out for in 2021.
Every expert has been carefully evaluated based on their expertise, their contributions to Serverless, their GitHub stars/karma points on Hacker News and other platforms, and what one can learn from them.
There is no particular order that we have followed and every person mentioned in the list is equally important and valuable.
Let’s get started with the list.
Yan Cui
Yan Cui is one of the leading names in the Serverless space and is currently working as the principal consultant at THEBURNINGMONK, Dev advocate at Lumigo.
Yan’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
His focus is to help organizations around the world accelerate product and feature development by adopting Serverless technologies and helping them avoid costly mistakes.
Where you can find his work:
You can find all of his posts around Serverless on his Medium blog, Yan Cui and also on his theburningmonk website. Yan Cui aims at helping people understand and adopt Serverless through his podcasts and also through workshops and masterclasses on his page.
You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn to find a lot of good information about Serverless technology.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower is a Staff Developer Advocate at Google, co-chair of KubeCon, the largest Kubernetes conference, and an avid open-source technologist.
Kelsey’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He has assumed several technology roles during his career and is one of the leaders in the Kubernetes space.
Kelsey extensively talks on topics related to Serverless, Kubernetes, open-source, and others and he aims at building simple tools that make life easier.
Where you can find his work:
Currently, you will often find him talking about an application that will help people come out of debt using common sense. Kelsey has a very minimalistic approach and maintains that on his Twitter feed as well.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Rodric Rabbah
Rodric Rabbah is the co-founder and CTO of Nimbella. He is also a creator and a lead technical contributor to Apache OpenWhisk.
Rodric’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He was a Principal Researcher at IBM, where he created Apache OpenWhisk.
Where you can find his work:
rodric takes the lead in several events on Serverless and extensively writes several articles on Serverless cloud computing, and APIs on his blog.
His efforts are driven towards helping enterprises and developers move ahead in their journey towards Serverless adoption.
Find him here: Website, Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter.
Jeremy Daly
Jeremy has very recently assumed the position of the GM of Serverless Cloud at Serverless Inc. Jeremy’s contribution to Serverless has been massive.
Jeremy’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Amongst the many topics that Jeremy is an expert in, Serverless comes at the top of his list.
Where you can find his work:
Jeremy has spoken in many conferences, written numerous blogs, created several open-source projects, wrote the newsletter Off-by-none, and even wrote a Serverless musical!
His focus is on helping others learn and adopt Serverless along with programming and product management.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Slobodan Stojanović
Slobodan is the CTO of Vacation Tracker and Cloud Horizon, and also the organizer of the JSBelgrade Meetup group.
Slobodan’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He is an AWS Serverless Hero, Claudia.js core team member, and co-author of Serverless Applications with Node.js book.
Where you can find his work:
Slobodan writes many articles on Serverless and Node. You can find most of his articles on his website.
You can also learn from his several talks that he has delivered on Serverless, Serverless architecture, and others, all of which are present on his personal website.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Tom McLaughlin
Tom McLaughlin is the founder of SeverlessOps and a leading Serverless Advocate in the DevOps community.
Tom’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
His company is a consulting firm that provides Serverless infrastructure training and advisory services for DevOps transformations.
It was his curiosity of what would happen if servers were gone that got him digging deeper.
Where you can find his work:
Tom has authored the book Serverless DevOps and also writes some great articles on his blog, ServerlessOps. He also delivers many talks on Serverless infrastructure.
He focuses on the operational aspects of Serverless and you can learn the challenges associated with it, and how the responsibilities of Operations Engineers are changing.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Sam Kroonenberg
Sam Kroonenberg and his brother Ryan Kroonenburg, co-founded A Cloud Guru, a startup that has changed the technical training paradigm.
Sam’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Their online platform has trained students across the world in AWS.
Where you can find his work:
Sam actively speaks and writes about Serverless, cloud computing. You can find his work, videos, and contributions to the Serverless community on the official ACG blog.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Ryan Kroonenburg
Ryan Kroonenburg is the brother of Sam Kroonenburg, who together founded A Cloud Guru, the platform that trains beginners as well as professionals to become experts in the cloud.
Ryan’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He knows the world of the cloud inside out and is confident that his courses are like no other.
ACG has truly shifted the trend in technical training.
Where you can find his work:
You can find his courses on Udemy. Ryan is also the co-founder of Serverless Conf and is extremely passionate about Serverless.
You can find his blogs, videos, and talks on Serverless, cloud computing, and AWS across the internet.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Danilo Poccia
Danilo Poccia is the Chief Evangelist (EMEA) at AWSCloud and specializes in Serverless, IoT, AI/ML analytics among others.
Danilo’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Danilo works with companies and startups of all sizes, works on Serverless architecture, technical programming, and business innovation.
Where you can find his work:
You can read his book AWS Lambda in Action, a book about event-driven Serverless Applications. He also writes and speaks on Serverless and you can find all his work on his website.
Danilo helps bring ideas to life and you can learn how to do exactly that using Serverless from him.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Paul Johnston
Paul’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Paul Johnston had previously co-founded the ServerlessDays and then moved to providing Interim CTO services, Advisory, Due Diligence, Technology, and Cloud Consulting Services, and cutting edge Cloud and Serverless strategic consulting and development services to companies around the world.
Where you can find his work:
Paul actively contributes to the Serverless community by publishing some great content on his Medium Blog.
You can also find many of his talks on YouTube where he extensively talks and educates people about Serverless.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Ajay Nair
Ajay Nair is the General Manager of the Lamda Experience at AWS.
Ajay’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He has delivered several talks on Serverless, Serverless architecture, Serverless considerations amongst others.
Where you can find his work:
He has also co-authored the book Serverless Architectures on AWS and writes extensively on his tweets about Serverless and keeps offering updates and opinions on the same.
Find him here: Twitter, LinkedIn.
Marcia Villalba
Marcia has been in the software industry for over 10 years now and currently works as a full-stack developer at Rovio.
Marcia’s expertise and what you can learn from her:
She also owns her consultancy firm Unicorn.codes that help companies migrate to Serverless by educating them or providing hands-on help.
Where you can find her work:
Marcia has a YouTube channel by the name FooBar where she focuses on teaching AWS Serverless technologies through fun videos.
You can also find lots of courses by her on Serverless in English and Spanish.
Along with the many titles, she has won, she is also a Serverless Champion and a co-organizer of the Finland AWS User Group.
Find her here: Website, YouTube, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Ben Kehoe
Ben Kehoe is a Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobots making Serverless Roombas.
Ben’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
While he works on using the internet to enable robots to do better things, he focuses on developing businesses through Serverless applications.
Where you can find his work:
Ben avidly writes and speaks about Serverless and discusses its applications, the future and the present, and how it could benefit businesses.
His Twitter feed is also quite interesting with lots of information on Serverless along with his blog on Medium.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Charity Majors
Charity Majors is currently the CEO and Co-founder of Honeycomb but previously she served as an operations and database engineer for several years.
Charity’s expertise and what you can learn from her:
She is enthusiastic about several topics all related to computers and speaks on several topics including Serverless, CloudOps, AWS, debugging databases, and many more.
Where you can find her work:
You can find her articles on her blog where she has a separate page where she talks about Serverless and all things related.
You can also often find interesting pieces written by Charity Majors about Serverless on her tweets.
Find her here: Website, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Julian Wood
Julian Wood currently works as the Serverless Developer Advocate and his motto is to make the world fall in love with Serverless.
Julian’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
You can find his Twitter feed loaded with tweets and reshares about interesting things about Serverless, AWS Lamda functions, and Cloud.
Julian also receives a lot of praises for the presentations and talks he delivers and he speaks a lot about Serverless.
Where you can find his work:
You can find many of his articles on his blog. Julian is also one of the lead contributors on Serverless Land.
Developers can learn how to transform the way they build their applications using Serverless technologies from him.
Find him here: Website, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson is the former co-founder of IOpipe which was acquired by New Relic and specialized in monitoring and observability for AWS Lamba Serverless applications.
He now is the Principal Product Manager at New Relic Serverless where he is helping developers build modern applications on Serverless.
Adam’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Adam and his IOpipe co-founder Erica Windisch are highly experienced in the field of Serverless and they help enterprises gain granular views into their Serverless applications to troubleshoot applications.
Where you can find his work:
You must look out for Adam’s tweets as they are very relevant, informative and some of the best out there.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Erica Windisch
Erica Windisch and Adam Johnson together formed IOpipe which was then taken over by New Relic during which Erica along with Adam joined the New Relic team and is now the Principal Engineer at New Relic.
Erica’s expertise and what you can learn from her:
Erica has been helping organizations maximize the benefits of Serverless applications, speed up debugging processes, and building tools to help companies adopt Serverless.
Since 2002, Erica has been innovating cloud computing technologies.
Where you can find her work:
She actively speaks at Serverless events and also maintains her blog on Medium where she talks about how their technologies could help enterprises as well as developers.
Find her here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Srushith R
Srushith is the Head of Engineering at Konfhub Technologies.
Srushith’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He is passionate about building Serverless applications and sharing experiences at various events across the globe and believes that Serverless is the future of software development and the way applications will be built moving forward.
Where you can find his work:
Srushith has started Serverless Saturdays, a monthly webinar focusing on everything Serverless aimed at helping developers kickstart their Serverless journey.
He has also recently founded the Tirupati AWS User Group and also started the first Serverless-focused meetup group in Bangalore, India. Developers can follow him to get started with their journey towards Serverless.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn
Allen Helton
Allen Helton is a Software Engineering Manager at Tyler Technologies with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry.
Allen’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
His focus lies in proper API development, Serverless technology, cloud development, and AWS.
He also works closely with the companies Postman and The Open API Initiative.
Where you can find his work:
You can follow his blog on Medium where he writes extensively about Serverless, Cloud, best practices, and updates.
Allen also often speaks on Serverless on different platforms and helps the community on platforms like Dev.to by answering queries and loves sharing his knowledge on his blog Ready, Set, Cloud!
Find him here: Dev.to, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Rob Allen
Rob Allen is a software consultant and developer with many years of experience in a variety of interesting languages.
Rob’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He’s particularly interested in APIs and the ecosystem around them and contributes to Apache OpenWhisk, rst2pdf & Slim Framework along with other open-source projects.
Where you can find his work:
Rob is a published author and based in the UK where he runs Nineteen Feet Limited, focussing on API development, training, and consultancy.
In his spare time, Rob blogs at akrabat.com and can often be seen with a camera in his hand.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Pavan Belagatti
Pavan Belagatti works as the Growth Manager & DevOps Advocate at Shippable and for the DevOps and Community Engagement at JFrog.
Pavan’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He is very enthusiastic about DevOps and is also a tech storyteller who writes avidly on his Medium Blog. He is a Google certified digital marketing professional.
Where you can find his work:
He has written over 100 articles on the topic of DevOps alone, also writes about growth hacking for startups, personal branding, and motivation.
Pavan aims to bridge the gap between marketing and tech.
He contributes extensively on platforms worldwide, some of them being Linux Foundation, DZone, The Next Web, Influencive, Thrive Global, Tech in Asia, Entrepreneur Magazine, Computer Weekly. All his work on Kubernetes and DevOps on his blog are in the form of very interesting stories.
Find him here: Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Keith Casey
Keith Casey currently serves on the Product Team at Okta working on Identity and Authentication APIs.
Keith’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Previously, he served as an early Developer Evangelist at Twilio and before that worked on the Ultimate Geek Question at the Library of Congress.
His underlying goal is to get good technology into the hands of good people to do great things.
Where you can find his work:
In his spare time, D Keith helps build and support the Austin tech community, and blogs at CaseySoftware.com. He is also a co-author of “A Practical Approach to API Design” from Leanpub.
Find me here: Twitter, LinkedIn.
Michele Sciabarra
Michele is currently the CEO of a consultancy firm focused on Kubernetes and Serverless, sciabarra.com. He is also the Area Manager for Nimbella Europe where he focuses on building the core products.
Michele’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Michele has authored the book O’Reilly in which he demonstrates how to build a Serverless application using classical design patterns and the programming language.
He is one of the most influential and knowledgeable figures in the Serverless space and publishes articles and training guides extensively on several platforms.
Where you can find his work:
Michele has a huge following on LinkedIn where he shares great insights and updates about Serverless, deep learning, and other technology updates. You can learn everything about Serverless by following his guides, reading his articles, shares and by following his work.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Benjamin Smith
Ben is also a senior developer advocate for Serverless Applications at Amazon Web Services based in London, UK.
Benjamin’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Previously, he has worked extensively in Workflow automation and web development which shows that he is passionate about Serverless, open-source technology, and automation.
You can learn from him how Serverless technologies can be made more accessible for PHP developers.
Where you can find his work:
A lot of Benjamin’s tweets on Twitter talk about Serverless, the latest developments, and tips to help the community with Serverless technologies.
He is also one of the lead contributors on Serverless Land and delivers talks and numerous great articles on Serverless, PHP, and adoption of Serverless technologies.
Find him here: Twitter, LinkedIn.
James Thomas
James is currently an independent Software Consultant and has worked with IBM previously for 13 years. He specializes in Cloud Application Development and Serverless.
Jame’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
His last role at IBM was that of a Lead Developer Advocate for Serverless at IBM Cloud. James is an open-source committer and PMC member on Apache OpenWhisk.
He is the co-founder of the Serverless Days London Conference series after which he created the Serverless Days movement.
Where you can find his work:
James widely posts on his blogs on several Serverless topics and also speaks at conferences worldwide. You can find a lot of information on Serverless and the latest developments through the conference videos all on Youtube.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter.
Rowan Udell
Rowan Udell is a Cloud Practise Director at Versent and is enthusiastic about Serverless, DevOps, software development, CI/CD, and AWS.
Rowan’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
Rowan also launched a course by the name The Serverless Framework: Build a Chatbot on the A Cloud Guru Platform.
Where you can find his work:
He has co-authored the book The AWS Administration Cookbook and also spoken on several topics about Serverless.
You can find all his talks and videos on his blog and also catch his podcast on Cloud and Serverless under podcasts. His articles are some of the best informational ones out there on Serverless.
Find him here: Website, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Forrest Brazzeal
Forrest Brazzeal is currently a senior manager at A Cloud Guru, he spent years designing applications for the cloud at Infor and Trek10 and led Serverless projects.
Forrest’s expertise and what you can learn from him:
He hosted the Think FaaS Serverless podcast at Trek10. Forrest is also a cartoonist and has created the comic FaaS and Furious.
Where you can find his work:
He is also one of the original Amazon Serverless Heroes and currently interviews big names for the Serverless Heroes Series at A Cloud Guru.
Forrest also speaks and writes extensively on cloud computing and you can find his work on his blog as well as Trek 10 and ACG websites. You can learn a lot from him about FaaS and cloud computing.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Chris Munns
Chris Munns is the Lead Developer Advocate for Serverless Applications at Amazon Web Services.
Chris’ expertise and what you can learn from him:
Chris writes some of the best articles on topics related to Serverless.
Where you can find his work:
You can also find his articles on the Serverless Land blog where is one of the lead contributors.
chrismunns is known to speak at many conferences and meetups in the Serverless Community in many different communities. He is also interested in and talks about other topics including DevOps and Cloud.
Find him here: Website, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn.
That’s about it. Follow these Serverless Experts and grow your understanding of Serverless easily.
Author:
Mihika Pal is an independent marketer working currently with Nimbella and a content writer. She began her career as a hotelier and then moved onto marketing. She is extremely passionate about writing and likes to work independently with brands on their marketing campaigns. You can find her profile on Upwork as one of the Top rated talents in her field.
This article was originally published on Nimbella’s blog. To read more such articles, keep an eye on this space, visit Nimbella’s website, and follow us on Twitter.