2025-05-20 –, Main Stage
Learn about where serverless compute went wrong and how we can fix it so that the visions of "just upload your code and it works" becomes a reality.
Serverless compute has been a concept for decades (anyone else remember cgi-bin and PHP?), but it really got popular 10 years ago with the launch of AWS Lambda. At the time, smart people predicted that serverless would be the only way software was deployed in the near future.
What went wrong? Why aren't we all just uploading code to the cloud and having it magically run at scale, reliably?
In this talk I'll briefly go over the history of serverless compute and it's promises, and then cover where it failed those promises and why. Then I will present solutions to those problems and how we can build a truly serverless compute platform that just works.
I will cover serverless compute problems such as:
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cold starts
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lack of state
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the need to manage many services to accomplish simple tasks
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the logging, compliance, auditing, security, and debugging issues with serverless compute (all related)
And then talk about solutions to those problems, many of which are found in the open-source Transact library, which you can download and use on your own.
Serverless compute was supposed to take over, but it has problems. I'll tell you how to fix them and make "just upload and it runs well" a reality.
Jeremy is an angel investor and advisor for various incubators and startups, and the CEO of DBOS. He was the founding Reliability Engineer for Netflix and before that he ran ops for reddit as its first engineering hire. Jeremy also tech-edited the highly acclaimed AWS for Dummies, and he is one of the six original AWS Heroes. He is a noted speaker in serverless computing, distributed computing, availability, rapid scaling, and cloud computing, and holds a Cognitive Science degree from UC Berkeley.