AWS Developer Community Support
The AWS developer community is an incredibly active and supportive technical forum. There are several avenues you can pursue to become part of this community, and doing so is highly recommended, both for your growth as a serverless engineer and to ensure the successful adoption of serverless within your enterprise. They include:
Engage with AWS Developer Advocates (DAs).
AWS’s DAs connect the developer community with the different product teams at AWS. You can follow serverless developments on social media. You will find the serverless specialist DAs helping the community by answering questions and contributing technical content via blogs, live streams and videos, GitHub code shares, conferences, meetups, etc.
Reach out to AWS Heroes and Community Builders.
The AWS Heroes program recognizes AWS experts whose contributions make a real impact in the tech community. Outside AWS, these experts share their knowledge and serverless adoption stories from the trenches.
At the time of writing this book, Sheen Brisals has been recognized as an AWS Serverless Hero.
The AWS Community Builders program is a worldwide initiative to bring together AWS enthusiasts and rising experts who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with AWS product teams and DAs, Heroes, and industry experts. Identifying the builders who contribute to the serverless space and learning from their experiences will deepen your knowledge.
At the time of writing this book, Luke Hedger has been recognized as an AWS Community Builder.
Join an AWS Cloud Club.
There’s a thriving student-led community, with AWS Cloud Clubs in multiple regions worldwide. Students can join their local club to network, learn about AWS, and build their careers. Cloud Club Captains organize events to learn together, connect with other clubs, and earn AWS credits and certification vouchers, among other opportunities.
Sign up with AWS Startup or AWS Educate.
AWS has popular programs to help bring your ideas to realization. AWS Activate is for anyone with great ideas and ambitions or start-ups less than 10 years old. AWS offers the necessary tools, resources, credits, and advice to boost success at every stage of the journey.
AWS Educate is a learning resource for students and professionals. It offers AWS credits that can be used for courses and projects, access to free training, and networking opportunities.
Attend AWS conferences.
An essential part of an enterprise’s serverless adoption journey is continuously evaluating its development processes, domains, team organization, engineering culture, best practices, etc. Conferences and collaborative events are the perfect platforms to find solutions for your concerns, validate your ideas, and identify actions to correct before it is too late.
The type and scale of conferences vary. For example, AWS re:Invent is an annual week-long conference that brings tens of thousands of tech and business enthusiasts together with hundreds of sessions spread over five days, whereas AWS Summits and AWS Community Summits are local events—mostly one-day—conducted around the world to bring the community and technology experts closer. Most of the content gets shared online as well. AWS Events and Webinars is a good place to identify events that might suit your purposes.
Summary
As you start your serverless journey, either as an independent learner or as part of an enterprise team, it is valuable to have an understanding of how the cloud evolved and how it facilitated the development of serverless technology. This chapter provided that foundation, and outlined the significant potential of serverless and the benefits it can provide to an organization.
Every technology requires a solid platform to thrive and a passionate community to support it. While by no means the only option out there, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a fantastic platform with numerous service offerings and dedicated devel‐ oper support programs. As highlighted in this chapter, to be successful in your serverless adoption, it is paramount that you share your experiences and learn from proven industry experts.
In the next chapter, we will look at serverless adoption in an enterprise. We will examine some of the fundamental things an organization needs to evaluate and do to onboard serverless and make it a successful venture for its engineers, users, and business.
