 from the Regency Center in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Serverless Conf San Francisco 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Serverless Conf 2018 here in San Francisco, our second year doing the program and happy to welcome back to the program, Sam Krünenberg, who is the CEO and founder, the guy that built A Cloud Guru, the company behind this Serverless Conf show, so thanks so much for joining me and we really appreciate that we can be here as a media partner. Thanks, Stu, thanks for coming along. It's been great, the conference has been great so far and it's great to have you here. Yeah, so Serverless, one of those technologies we've been talking about for a few years, super exciting, a lot of energy and I feel like it's translating the show, good buzz in the show. I hear about 500 people, so give us, compare and contrast for us a year ago to today. Yeah, there's huge energy here. This is the biggest turnout that we've had to date. You know, we started this two years ago in 2016, I think we had a couple of hundred people. Mostly at that time it was the vendors, it was like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and then some enthusiasts. I think last year we started seeing more of the tooling companies, the startups around the serverless space starting to come in and this year it's just exploded. I mean, if you have a look and you walk around and see the sponsor booths, it's just this explosion of new tooling companies that are, I guess, doing value ads on top of what the vendors are doing. So, yeah, like security, monitoring is a whole range of them. Yeah, and Sam, you were one of the first companies I talked to where it was like, oh, okay, this technology that just allows me spend a few weeks in a basement building a company that just totally changed the economics of how you build the company and how you deliver a service to users. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I built the original school in four weeks and I locked myself in a bedroom and because I built it serverless, not only was it cheap to run, but it scaled incredibly easily. I didn't have the operational overheads. If something, I didn't have to worry, what if we get a spike in traffic in the middle of the night while I'm asleep? You know, when we didn't have a lot of staff and it allowed us to move quickly early on, which was fantastic. So there was a lot of like rapid development tests and feedback cycles. But interestingly now, I find one of the biggest differentiators for us is the cost. The cost is so low. We do six and a half million lambda invocations every day. 1.8 million API requests and we pay $550 a month for compute for the entire business, 650,000 customers. Yeah, game changing on the economics. That is game changing. That is orders of magnitude, yeah. So it's, yeah, incredible. All right, A-Click Group Guru as a company has expanded quite a bit. It's not just AWS anymore. It's beyond. Tell us a little bit about the company and give us your viewpoint of serverless overall. It's much more than just lambda today. Yeah, for sure. So the company as a whole, we've grown like crazy. It's been great. We've expanded out. We're in Texas, in Austin, Texas now. And in the UK and in Australia. Yeah, we've a lot more focus on other clouds as well. So we've just released our first Google certification courses. We've got a few Google courses, a whole bunch of Azure courses. And we're seeing a lot of demand within our customer base and enterprises that we work with to go multi-cloud. So yeah, and I think the serverless space is kind of a little bit by nature more vendor agnostic than the generic cloud computing space. It's easier for companies to architect across clouds. Yeah, I'd love to dig into that a little bit for us because most of the people I talk to, it's pretty much dominated by lambda today and some of the other services that AWS have. Are you finding people that are doing serverless multi-cloud? There was just an announcement on that canative stuff where we're all trying to dig into. So what do you see on the kind of non-Amazon serverless? I think everyone has their preference. And like, so we are mostly built on AWS, but we use Firebase as well and we use Google Vision. And I think because when you build serverless, you're building against managed services effectively with APIs that you can build against and manage service in AWS and hit its API or you can hit one in Google, right? You've got that kind of boundary around the system. So yeah, I think it's a little bit easier just by its very nature of being really, you're building, architecting on a set of managed services. But I would say most companies are still focused on particular clouds, but I just mean by nature it's a little easier to build multi-cloud. So you mentioned a couple of other services you're using. The thing I want to ask you is, so many times in technology, it's like, oh, when you're a startup, you can do the latest and greatest cool new thing and you built on Lambda. And then two or three years later, wait, wait, it's changed and therefore, wait, I architected something differently. So give us your viewpoint as an architect as to how things have changed. Does using serverless allow you to just kind of be on the new thing easier than if I had kind of built on serverless? I'm actually talking about this in my talk tomorrow and I think one of the big advantages of serverless is that you can change your architecture over time much more easily. So when I built the platform originally, I built a monolith. It was a serverless monolith. There was like a whole bunch of functions reading to and writing from the same database and just highly coupled. And it was just this big kind of beast. Over time, as we brought on development teams, they didn't work anymore. They needed to be able to specialize in different areas. So we changed to a microservices architecture. We did that incrementally over time, but we changed our entire architecture without ever once having to think about infrastructure. We didn't have to think about what's the load balances? How's the web farm going to work? How am I going to autoscale? Infrastructure was an issue. So changing our architecture is just a matter of changing a YAML file, changing configuration file, hit deploy, cloud formation deals with it. So I think it gives you that flexibility. It's great. I mean, for years they used to talk about it. Well, when you build your infrastructure, well, what version of OS do you have? What gear do you have? And if you go to AWS or Azure or GCP, you don't say what version you're running on because you're running on whatever they had. But even in traditional infrastructure as a service, it's not what version you're running on. But it's like, oh wait, I have this compute instance. And now there's these new versions out and how do I move and change? And there's tooling to help with that. But it sounds like you're saying with the serverless microservices, it makes that even easier. Well, even with typical cloud, let's say instance-based, say EC2-based cloud, if you want to introduce a new microservice, you've got to be thinking about, yeah, what's my entry point? How am I going to load balance? How am I going to set up my auto-scaling? We just don't have to have those conversations. You know it's going to scale. Just expose an API endpoint or a Lambda function and just invoke it. And I think, who is it? Rob from Nordstrom is doing a talk of from one to N. With serverless, if what works for one invocation works for a million invocations. It just scales from one to N without any change in architecture. I think that's really compelling. That's the whole scale thing that we've been talking about, but really it does. Yeah, to talk a little bit, give some stats as to scaling your business. You don't want to need the limits or issues or spikes as to- I think over time, we've occasionally contacted AWS to increase concurrent execution limits and some of that stuff. If you just, you can pre-plan that, see that coming and talk to them about it. But we used to have to worry about write and read throughput on DynamoDB and now they have auto-scaling. We don't have to worry about that. So I think a lot of those constraints that were there in AWS infrastructure are changing now too. So yeah, it's something we have to do very, very rarely. Yeah, any commentary on the maturing space of serverless as to any limits that have been lifted, not just in Lambda, but in general, or things that you're looking forward to in the future that might expand some of the use cases or allow things to grow even faster. I think obvious things like SQS Lambda integration is great to finally have it. So there's some things that everyone was just waiting for. Got to pre-existing things. No, I think what's most interesting to me, like I get the vendors will keep innovating. They'll keep making this faster and more scalable and like tooling around that to make it easier to develop. I think we did an executive summit yesterday prior to the conference. And one of the things that really resonated to me in that summit was when you're a developer, a developer's entire experience of serverless is the dev experience. That's kind of all they see. Like they're not in the back-end infrastructure worrying about the monitoring the servers and all of that kind of stuff. So they're not looking so much at the ops. So their experience of serverless is the dev experience. So I think starting to see the vendors focus on dev tooling like Sam and having Sam local. And that is really great to see because that's improving experiences for developers. But I think the thing that excites me more than what the vendors are doing is what the startup ecosystem is doing in the security space, monitoring management. I know serverless just announced their new product for the serverless platform for deployment. So I think that I kind of get a little bit more excited about that. And the other thing is of course users that are doing cool and interesting things. I love to show you mentioned Nordstroms is presenting. I've heard them on podcasts before. I had Fender on today talk about how serverless helps them in the application. Had the people serverless.com talking about how even in marketing content serverless can help them do. Any other kind of cool, interesting stories that you could share? Yeah, I've seen like Expedia are doing a lot in the serverless space now. They're doing a lot there. Another one, even Netflix. Netflix aren't using, from my understanding, they're not using public cloud but they've rolled their own but they're using the same architectural principles and practices so they have their own function as a service system built internally. So it's interesting to see the same patterns applied outside of public cloud where they may not make sense for them as a business to be running particular things in AWS. So yeah, I think, yeah, there's a range. All right, Sam, I want to give you the final words, takeaways from the show and what to look for from a cloud guru in the future? Yeah, we've got a whole lot more AWS content coming, a lot more labs and a lot more Google and Azure content coming. So you just see a lot more really cool content from us. A lot more focus, our focus now is a lot on training teams at scale and enterprises. So we do a lot of work with large enterprises on helping them transform their talent. So we're doing a lot of work on that. And yeah, I think tomorrow at the serverless comp show, we've got Simon Wardley. I'm talking, so of course that'll be amazing. No, we've got some really good Linda Nichols from CloudReach this afternoon. So I'm excited, yeah, you can see a lot of cool content. Sam, really wanted to appreciate you, the partnership bringing theCUBE here for the second year and congrats, great community year. Yeah, thank you. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Yeah, and thank you for supporting us. All right, Sam Cronenberg, I'm Stu Miniman and be sure to check out the kube.net for all of the content for shows in the past as well as where we'll be in the future. Reach out to us if there's a show that we should be at that you don't see on the list. For the whole crew here, most of them, the Palo Alto and San Francisco base, I'm an East Coast guy, but happen to be in the area. Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.