The Top 15 Serverless Chats Podcast Episodes (so far)
As of this writing, there are now over 115 episodes of Serverless Chats! It's been an incredible journey and I've learned so much about serverless from all these amazing guests (and I hope you have too). Recently, with the addition of Rebecca Marshburn as my co-host, we've added even more perspective to these conversations, expanding well beyond the technical and diving deeper into how serverless affects people, processes, and productivity.
If you're new to serverless (and Serverless Chats), it can be hard to get started. Finding the right content and information can be overwhelming. If you're a serverless veteran, finding interesting conversations that go beyond Hello World examples can also be challenging. My hope is that Serverless Chats provides a good mix for both the skeptical beginner and the experienced serverless developer. But even so, with 115 episodes, where do you start?
I've gone through the last 115 episodes and picked out a few of my ultra-favorites. If I simply listed my favorites, you might as well just go to the full list of episodes since I enjoyed all of these conversations so much, that I'd happily (and sometimes do) go back and listen to any one of them. But in the interest of saving you some time, here are 15 episodes that I believe capture some of the most important aspects of serverless. Some of them are technical, some focus more on the serverless experience, and some of them show the power of this amazing community. Enjoy.
15. AWS re:Invent 2020 Heroes re:Cap (Episode #86)
February 1, 2021 - On this episode, we recapped the major serverless announcements from AWS re:Invent 2020 with help of AWS Heroes Yan Cui, Serhat Can, Luca Bianchi, Farrah Campbell, Ran Ribenzaft, Ben Ellerby, Sheen Brisals, and Gillian Armstrong.
14. Serverless for Startups with Chris Munns (Episode #113)
October 4, 2021 - In this episode, Chris talked about the evolution of serverless and how the tools and services have matured over the years. We also discussed how the learning curve of serverless affects adoption, what goes into building an effective developer advocacy team, and what advice he has for startups looking to get started with the cloud.
13. Streaming Data at Scale Using Serverless with Anahit Pogosova (Episode #91 & Episode #92)
March 8 & 15, 2021 - In this two part episode, Anahit shared her thoughts on where and why we'd use Kinesis, how to embrace (and deal with) the failures, and addresses some common serverless misconceptions. These are highly technical episodes, but some of my favorites.
12. Building a Business Around Serverless with Nofar Asselman (Episode #87)
February 8, 2021 - On this episode, Nofar spoke about the current state of the "serverless" market, what opportunities exist for tools and solutions supporting serverless, how to leverage partnerships to build trust in your product, and actions you can take right now.
11. Serverless Privacy & Compliance with Mark Nunnikhoven (Episode #71 & Episode # 72)
October 19 & 26, 2020 - In this two part episode, Mark explains why your online privacy is so important, what we need to think about in terms of compliance, and how serverless helps us create more secure applications.
10. Going Green with Serverless with Paul Johnston (Episode #59 & Episode #60)
July 27, 2020 & August 3, 2020 - In this two part episode, Paul shares how serverless compares to traditional computing in terms of being "green", the impact of data centers on climate, why efficiency is only a first step, and what people in tech can do to affect change. We then get into how the big cloud providers are addressing climate change, what the tech industry can do as a whole, the effect this will have on globalized business, and how the positive downstream impact of choosing serverless can create a more sustainable business.
9. Serverless Infrastructure as Code with Ben Kehoe (Episode #107)
June 28, 2021 - On this episode, Ben explained what infrastructure as code really means and why IaC with serverless is different than non-serverless architectures. He also talked about how IaC defines resource graphs that fully specify the state of your system and why is it important for developer intent to be maintained by IaC systems.
8. Static First Using Serverless Front-ends with Guillermo Rauch (Episode #50)
May 25, 2020 - Guillermo explains the difference between front-end and backend serverless, how we should think about and build for scale, and why latency down to the first contentful paint is so important.
7. Serverless Developer Culture with Linda Nichols (Episode #48)
May 11, 2020 - In this episode, Linda talks about why modern cloud developers should be writing less code, how new deployment processes affect the testing culture, and why Ops teams are still really important.
6. The Past, Present, and Future of Serverless with Tim Wagner (Episode #52)
June 8, 2020 -On this episode, the one and only Tim Wagner shared some of the history behind AWS Lambda, why the stateless versus stateful debate still rages on, how to use serverless as a supercomputer, and what innovations are still needed in the serverless space.
5. Continuously Improving Serverless Standards at the LEGO Group with Nicole Yip (Episode #82)
January 4, 2021 - On this episode, Nicole shared how the LEGO Group continued to grow their serverless development teams, the evolving audit process they use to improve serverless standards, and the challenges they faced adopting those standards.
4. Data Modeling Strategies from The DynamoDB Book with Alex DeBrie (Episode #44)
April 13, 2020 - Alex shares why he wrote the DynamoDB Book, what are some key concepts to keep in mind when modeling data, and how using the right strategies can help you create more powerful single table designs.
3. Pushing the Limits of Lambda with Michael Hart (Episode #18 & Episode #19)
October 14 & 21, 2019 - In this two part episode, Michael explains the inner workings of AWS Lambda, the hows and whys of Custom Runtimes & Layers, Docker Lambda, serverless CI, and whether or not Lambdas should call Lambdas.
2. Why Developers Need to Think About Cloud Costs with Erik Peterson (Episode #6)
July 22, 2019 - In this episode, Erik Peterson talks about cultural changes around cost optimization in the cloud, cost as a first class metric, and how to predict total cost of ownership (TCO) according to your product roadmap.
1. Advanced NoSQL Data Modeling in DynamoDB with Rick Houlihan (Episode #34 & Episode #35)
February 3 & 10, 2020 - In this highly-technical two parter, Rick Houlihan talks about the use cases for NoSQL, why single table designs are so powerful, and ways to model relational data with GSIs. We also discussed why you likely don't want to use LSIs, when sharding is necessary, the benefits of denormalization, and how to efficiently store large document deltas.
I hope you found this list of episodes useful. Did I miss one of your favorites? Reach out to me on Twitter and let me know.