dotScale 2017 - Clay Smith - Searching for the Server in Serverless

Filmed at https://2017.dotscale.io on April 24th in Paris. More talks on https://dotconferences.com/talks Serverless technology is one of the most compelling—and hyped—cloud computing technologies to emerge in the past few years. While many teams are currently piloting projects using serverless Function as a Service (FaaS) products like AWS Lambda, there is still considerable confusion how to build fast, resilient services in this new environment when infrastructure, operating system, or container details are unavailable or hidden. By inspecting FaaS runtime environments, it is possible to learn more about the internals of FaaS systems. In this talk, Clay discusses the techniques involved in discovering as much as possible about the servers and infrastructure involved in FaaS from code running inside cloud functions, and how you can use that knowledge to have a deeper understanding of the potential and limitations of serverless technology and ultimately improve performance issues like cold starts.