 from the Regency Center in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Serverless Conf San Francisco 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hello, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Serverless Conf 2018 here in San Francisco. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Pete Sparsky, who's the Vice President of Contact at A Cloud Guru, the company that puts on the show. Pete, great to see you. Thank you Stu, it's great to be here with you. Thank you so much for coming to the conference. All right, so Serverless is one of these things. There's a lot of excitement around it. I'm super excited to start a second year having theCUBE here at this event. You've done these events at a number of global locations. You're actually based in Australia, so set us up, you gave some of the intro with Sam Cronenberg. You were the first non-Cronenberg member of A Cloud Guru, so first, give us a little bit about your background and what we hope to accomplish for the show like this. Thank you Stu. So like you said, I'm VP of content at A Cloud Guru. I was the first employee. I remember back in 2015, in the end of 2015, early 2016 when I joined, it was only Sam and Ryan and myself. Small company grew really quickly, but we had a passion for high quality education from the very start. So it's been incredible to see how the business has grown and how much passion there is in the community for great education. And for events such as this, where we try to educate and continue to talk about cloud computing. Yeah, Pete, I love, you know, when I talk to the Cronenberg brothers, the company, if it wasn't for serverless, I don't know that the company could have existed, definitely not in the form that it is, because really lowers the price point to be able to create and deliver the content. Therefore, the training is much less expensive. I want to talk a little bit about the dynamic of cloud and serverless, because A Cloud Guru is not just about serverless, but it's a main piece of what you guys, how you deliver it, and I'm sure something that, you know, the show and how people get involved with it. Yeah, absolutely. So our entire platform, our learning management system runs on serverless technologies. We don't have a single server anywhere. It's all lambda driven. It's incredibly cost efficient. It's very flexible, very scalable, and it's actually a fun project to work on for our developers. Yeah, and Pete, I have to say, you don't have a server anywhere, but eventually somewhere on the service that you put. Absolutely, there is some, exactly, exactly. You're totally right. You got me there, but at least from the perspective of our developers, you know, they are dealing in functions, they're thinking in code, they're thinking in design, patterns and architectures, and that's incredibly powerful. And like you said, it has been a disruptive thing, right? Because we've been able to build our platform quickly, cost effectively, and then focus on kind of our business value, focus on creating great, high quality, curated content, right? That education piece that we focus on, quality courses, quality content that we can use to teach people. Yeah, Pete, when I think about this, this is a very big mind shift for users because it's one thing to go from a server to a VM, to a container. I'm just changing a little bit the construct, but it's the same, but the nirvana we've been thinking about for years is my developer and my application, I shouldn't have to worry about this, but networking and compute and storage, these all things all need to work, and when something goes wrong, it's kind of challenging. So maybe talk a little about the content you create and how you balance the here's what you do and here's the organizational changes you need to make and who's involved and who isn't involved and what happens there. Absolutely, thank you for bringing that up because I think the mind shift is incredible. So for our team that actually works on the platform, they now can focus on delivering business values because they don't need to worry about managing infrastructure, managing service, thinking about say security in the same way we were thinking about security before. So still important, incredibly important, but the equation is now a little different and this does allow us to move quicker, right? It allows us to be much more flexible because we can focus on that architecture, on the design, on the code and not on kind of that other stuff. And it also gives us an opportunity to focus on our product, right? On that high quality education. So we focus a lot on kind of just teaching users, teaching our students what cloud computing is all about, helping them get certified. And then once they have that, learning how to build things with server technologies, right? It's an incredible change and people are asking how do I actually get started? How do I build this scalable e-commerce platform or how do I go and do big data processing in a serverless way? So there's a lot of opportunity and we've been building kind of this content and these courses to help people understand how to do these things. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up certifications. So I want you to talk a little bit about certifications as well as you're a, I believe a serverless hero, which is in AWS. It's not a certification, it's more, is it designation award? Yeah, I think it's bestowed, yeah. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, I remember 10 years ago there was discussion, well, maybe certification should be dead. If all it is is, you know, you get certified on something and every year you re-up, you pay some money, you have to go through training. You know, how valuable it is. So cloud certification is very different. So give us a little bit of landscape of certifications, how a cloud guru helps and then kind of the designation type stuff. Well, we have realized that certification is very important because it gives your engineering team, your company kind of the same basis, right? It gives people the same language, the same level of understanding. So moving forward, teams can move together. So certification kind of gives you that assurance, gives you the forency that, yes, everybody who's past it knows kind of those fundamental building blocks. So we help teams kind of understand what this is about. We're helping get certified, so we have courses aimed at that. But then after they get certified, they want you to stay up to date, right? And they need to specialize and dig deeper. They need to become a depth of various technologies, whether it's DynamoDB or something else. So it's like a path, right? You get certified, you get your basic understanding and then you specialize, you deep dive and then you stay up to date as well, right? And then you can circle back and maybe do like a professional level of certification. And so we help to really kind of guide people through that and help them understand how to go from no experience to a professional. Yeah, but one of the challenges is all of the cloud vendors have their own certification. Is there similarity between if I'm Google, Azure, AWS certified, are there any fast paths you can do if you've done one and you don't want to do the other? You know, obviously the fundamental skills, they conceptually, yes, absolutely, having an understanding of one cloud environment will help with the other. But the certifications are different, right? And that's why we have different video courses that you can take if you want to become AWS certified versus Google cloud certified. They have different focus sometimes. So it's kind of necessary to go and watch these courses, do the study, read the white papers and have the experience as well. You need to really have hands-on experience. So you need to start building things. Although, for example, for people who are not kind of from a tech background, they can take certifications like the certified cloud practitioner certification from Amazon, right? It's aimed at non-technical people. And it gives them kind of that understanding of the economics of cloud, right? What the services are without taking them deeper into the tech side of things. All right, and explain what it means to be a serverless hero which is in AWS. That is a great question. So, serverless hero is a designation. It's basically, it's given to people who are very active in the serverless community as a way to kind of say, okay, these are the people who share a lot of the community. And I guess it's a thanks from Amazon. So I was initially an AWS community hero and then they changed that to a serverless hero because I focus very much on serverless technologies. I talk, I have a book about it. So I've been really kind of focused on serverless tech throughout my career, over the past three years. Yeah, we're huge proponents of community here on theCUBE and look what you're doing at the event here. Talk about the serverless community itself because it's not just AWS, it's across lots of different environments. And I think back to Microsoft MVP or VMware vXperts. So tell us the state of the community. Yeah, I'll be honest. The community is my favorite part by far. Honestly, we have incredible people in the community across different cloud providers. We have people who are experts in AWS, Google, Azure, all kinds of different platforms just coming together, talking like this conference is a testament to it because we have speakers who are just starting with serverless people who've been doing it for a few years across different vendors, cloud providers, startups as well, huge enterprises. And it's incredible to see a conference like this that brings everybody together and it's very collaborative, it's very welcoming. And honestly, we're running for this. We're running for the community. All right, well, Pete, thanks so much for helping me kick off our coverage here at serverless.com. Thanks so much for joining me. Pete Sparsky, I'm Stu Miniman, and a hollow for watching theCUBE.