Mike Roberts
Architect, Tech Lead, Co-founder of Symphonia
Mike Roberts is an engineering leader and co-founder of Symphonia - https://www.symphonia.io - a serverless and cloud technology consultancy. Mike is a long-time proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is passionate about the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. He sees serverless as the next technological evolution of cloud systems and as such is excited about its ability to help teams, and their customers, be awesome.
Presentations
Over the last 20 years we’ve seen the lead time for delivering software decrease from years to weeks. Now we see an opportunity to reduce this further to days or even hours. This enables us to think about how we approach product development in a new way - one of 'Continuous Experimentation'. What advantages would doing this bring? What challenges would we face in doing this, and how would we surmount them? These are the questions that Mike Roberts addresses in this talk.
Serverless is a new technological approach to architecture and deployment. While cost benefits are one of the drivers of Serverless, its most interesting advantage is reducing ‘conception-to-production lead time’. Serverless does this by reducing the amount of code we need to write; by simplifying the deployment and operations of applications; and by minimizing the cost commitment of creating infrastructure.
Modern Agile (http://modernagile.org/) is a new take on ‘agile development’ as it was originally considered, and brings it up to date with conceptually aligned ideas - Lean Startup, Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Modern Agile is defined, simply, by four guiding principles: make people awesome; make safety a prerequisite; experiment and learn rapidly; and deliver value continuously.
Mike drills into the benefits that the combination of Serverless, Modern Agile, and a few other ideas can bring to accelerating how we work. Through this he shows how Continuous Experimentation might just be the next big change in the way we deliver software.
Serverless is the hot new way to develop applications in the cloud. At the core of a Serverless Architecture is Functions-as-a-Service, also known as Serverless Compute - small, lightweight, operations that you deploy simply as code snippets, and let your vendor platform do the work of operating. The most popular implementation of Serverless Compute is AWS Lambda.
This session will teach you how to develop applications using AWS Lambda functions implemented in Java. You don’t need any prior AWS experience, Lambda or otherwise. We start from first principles, and explain what is going on in the Lambda environment as we proceed. After this session you’ll be able to:
• Setup a development environment ready for working with AWS Lambda
• Develop, deploy and test Java Lambdas
• Make decisions about how to configure your Lambdas
• Understand the programming model that Lambda gives you
• Be able to decide what libraries you may or may not want to include
• Setup clean logging and monitoring
• Integrate Lambda with AWS API Gateway to build Java-backed Serverless web services.