Serverless Architecture Conference 2019 was hosted in The Hague, Netherlands during the 8 til 10 of Abril. I went there as a speaker and this article is about my key takeaways and experience attending that event.

Serverless Archicture Conference (http://serverless-architecture.io) is a two day conference with one day workshop. It is a new conference in the Serverless world and this was its first edition.

There was an interesting line up of speakers, separated in two tracks. I couldnt see a difference between the tracks. Two days of talks and two tracks that are a lot of talks and speakers. Talks were about very diverse topics, from all the different cloud providers, to all kind of topics, architecture, security and costs. The conference was clearly targeted to developers and architects.

I went there to give a talk. I talked about Serverless and GraphQL that is one of my favorite topics at the moment. You can find my slides here: https://www.slideshare.net/MarciaVillalba/serverless-3-graphql-2019-serverless-architecture-conference. It was fun to give the talk as the audice was asking a lot of questions and interacting a lot after the presentation.

The audience was not very big, there were around 60-70 participants, but as they were distributed into two tracks, in each of the tracks you always had a small group of people. That make the conference very interactive and with a lot of questions.

By the end of the conference a lot of the speakers went to the stage to answer some questions that the audience make. That was really fun! We were many experts on stage and a very diverse audience, from Serverless beginers to experts in the field.

Top 3 take aways

After attending a lot of the talks here are my main take aways from the talks that I saw:

1. Ory Segal (https://twitter.com/orysegal) from PureSec gave a very interesting talk about security in serverless applications and he told a story on how he hacked Lambda. It was very interesting to see how important is to give the right IAM permissions to your functions. I need to make some piece of content about that, I have nothing about IAM permissions and I think is something very important for people to understand.

2. I really enjoyed Niko Köbler (https://twitter.com/dasniko) talk about Serverless in the multi cloud world. He started talking about how easy is to have multi cloud support and ended the talk showing how hard and unnecessary is for most of the cases. Still possible.

3. Jeremy Daly (https://twitter.com/jeremy_daly) talk about patterns in AWS was a nice refreshing view on some common patterns applied in the serverless world. He has a great blog post of this topic (https://www.jeremydaly.com/serverless-microservice-patterns-for-aws/), but the talk was updated with some more patterns and I think is something everybody doing serverless should check out.

The conference is happening again in Berlin in the 14 til 16 of October, so if you want to go there its was a great experience this first edition.

Now the call for papers is also open, if you are a speaker it was a fun conference, well organized and the organizers are very friendly and take care of the speakers. Also there were a lot of moments for the speakers to get to know each other.