Q&A with Cloudar Engineer Ben Bridts
Serverlessconf London is community led conference focused on serverless technologies and architectures. We are getting together to discuss how to build scalable, robust, high-performance systems using Function-as-a-Service technologies such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk and Google Cloud Functions; and Backend-as-a-Service technologies like Firebase, Auth0, and Algolia. In this series of short articles we are asking speakers to tell us about themselves and share their view of serverless technologies.
What’s your name and what do you do? Ben Bridts — I work as a Cloud Engineer at Cloudar.
In one or two sentences, what is your talk about? How we can leverage FaaS to improve the operations side of running an application or building an infrastructure, either as a replacement of traditional servers, or to do new things that were impractical before.
Why are FaaS/BaaS/serverless technologies and/or architectures interesting to you? When architecting applications to run on AWS, I’m always looking at ways to implement things ‘cloud first’. Using FaaS is a logical next step after autoscaling, microservices and immutable deployments.
What do you think will happen in this space over the next 12–24 months? We will see a growth in serverless adaptation, with an increased focus on integrating existing applications with FaaS. Moving away from queue’s and workers into a event based model to do backend processing, will be one of the first big integrations. But I think we will also start seeing more hybrid frontends (with part of the application served by a traditional web server, and some data retrieved from a function).
What is the one killer feature/product/service/idea that you would like to see created? Having a way to easily integrate functions with an IDE would be very impressive. Being able to inspect variables, add breakpoints, … like you can when remote debugging on a traditional server would be a nice addition to the serverless world.
Read more about Serverlessconf London or grab your early bird-ticket right now.
