>> Narrator: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE, on the ground at Serverlessconf brought to you by SiliconAngle Media >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with theCUBE at Serverless Conference in New York City, Hell's Kitchen. Happy to have with me, first time guest on the program Sam Kroonenburg, we had your brother on the program at the AWS Summit not far from here, at the Javits Center in New York City, but you're also one of the co-founders its the two brothers for A Cloud Guru. Thanks so much for joining me, and thank you for allowing us to come get some phenomenal content here. >> Yeah, no problem. Thank you for coming for the conference today. >> Alright, so Sam, take me back, you know, we talked to your brother a little bit about, well it was an interesting story, he said actually I got turned down for a job from Amazon and ended up creating a training company. But you built this and you built it on Serverless. >> I did yeah. >> So walk us through a little bit the thought process, the timing, you know, aren't you a little bit ahead of your time on that? >> Yeah, it was mid 2015, it was a strange time. We decided we wanted to build this school, this online learning platform, but the challenge we had was that we didn't have a lot of time, we both had families, kids, you know, mortgages, financial commitments. Basically I had four weeks. I had four weeks of leave owing to me, from my employer at the time. My wife and I had been planning this big family holiday with the kids for years and we were about to take it, and I remember having this phone call with Ryan and we were talking about how there were these people taking these online courses and they were really liking them. And we thought, what if we could build this school to teach people cloud computing. It was such a buzz and we just thought, there's something in this. But the challenge was the timing. I remember my wife turned to me and she said, "Look you've got to do it, we'll cancel the holiday, "take the four weeks and give it a try." So that's what we did, we actually flew down to live with Aaron, my in-laws and help look after the kids and I locked myself in a bedroom for four weeks and tried to build an online school. And that was there was no epiphany to go Serverless there was no grand plan. It was, we had a constraint, which was time. I had no time to build this thing. And so ended up using some of the latest technologies like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, a whole bunch of Serverless technologies because I saw that they would help me build this faster. And I could get something to market in the four weeks that I had. I actually spent the first couple of days trying to skin and configure Moodle, the learning management system and I tore my hair out and yeah, ended up putting this thing together with Serverless technologies. >> Ryan just walked by-- >> Oh, there he is. >> It's a llama unicorn with a cat or something like that. >> I'm going to put in the background. >> In the back of our video. Sam, what's your brother doing here? >> He's always trying to troll me. >> So talk to us, you know one of the things the maturation, kind of the speed of change in the industry for new technologies is just so fast these days. Take us through from those early days to you know Serverless today. What's your experience been? What would you say to people that look at this technology? >> I think it's a lot easier to get into now than it was two years ago. The ecosystem has grown around it, the core technologies are pretty much the same as they were two years ago, function as a service, execute functions in the cloud very similar, but the tooling around it, the ecosystem around it has grown. There's great deployment tools, orchestration systems that have come along. It's a lot easier to just get in now and early on, when we started we had to roll a lot of things ourselves, which took a lot of time, and that's what you're trying to stop, is losing time. Yeah, so there's that and the community has really grown, there's a lot of support in the community now. >> So if you had to do it all over, you could have done it in a weekend, rather than the four weeks. >> Yeah, instead of the four weeks. >> Yeah, I mean what's-- >> That's the interesting thing about what happened to us, we would not exist, our business would not exist if it wasn't for Serverless technologies. I literally couldn't, we could not have, built that school. It's not like it was the most amazing school when we launched it, but it was enough. It was just enough to get people using it, to get to market, to start to build a business around it. >> Alright, talk to me about this event. So, its the 5th Serverlessconf, not unheard of a company that does training to get involved with physical events, 'cause you bring them together, you know, what's the thought process, talk to us a little bit about that journey and this event itself. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is organic for us. We built, it was early last year, you know we're part of the Serverless communities, a lot of pioneering going on here, a lot of people facing the same challenges. And we thought, well there's no event to bring all of these people together. And there's a lot of very fast pace of change here, a lot of rapid ideation and new technologies. Let's bring everyone together and see what we can do. That's what we did with Serverlessconf. We've never run a conference before, we just hired a warehouse in Brooklyn, a bunch of Australians and British guys coming over and we just invited a bunch of people on Twitter and 250 people turned out to the first one. It just got bigger and bigger from there. So this is actually the 5th Serverlessconf now. >> Well, its a hot week again, so we appreciate that the air conditioning works at this one. >> Yes, we have air conditioning at this one. >> 460 people here, you brought in some great speakers, we had a number of them on our program this week, speak to us, I mean you've got sponsors here, you've got good speakers, give us some of the highlights. >> We've got all of the main Cloud vendors are here, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and it's actually the product teams who build this stuff. That's what I love about this event, it's actually the people who build it. It's vendor neutral, it's really cool. You get great thought leaders from the community, Simon Wardley was a highlight this morning, his talk on Value Chain Mapping and Strategy was really interesting. Randall Hunt from AWS X Space X, talking about the continuous integration process when building rockets. Space X was absolutely fascinating and what bugs in production mean when you're building a rocket. It means the rocket blows up. Really interesting variety of talks from those tooling providers, companies like us who are just building on Serverless and then Serverless tooling companies and vendors. Really fascinating. >> Alright, Sam what should we be looking for in the future from Serverless and from A Cloud Guru? >> We're going to be doing a whole lot more Serverless content. You're going to see a lot of really interesting new content through our site, a lot of teaching on Serverless, we're going to be doing more Serverless Conferences. You'll see a lot from us, not just us, but from the wider community who come to the conference, who we know well, a lot of the experts, we're going to be doing a lot of work with those people. >> Well Sam Kroonenburg, really appreciate you joining us, appreciate the media sponsorship to allow theCube to come get some great content and share it with our communities, hope to see you at many more events in the future. >> Thank you for coming. >> Thank you so much. Sam Kroonenburg, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Manhattan, It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to Midtown. We're at the Javits Center here. (sound cuts out) 2017, along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls and you're watching The Cube as we continue with what's happening here. About five thousand people on the show floor and they said some twenty thousand registrants. Right Stew? That people came in and wanted to watch the keynotes live. >> It could be ten thousand that walked through before the days-- >> Right, it's hard to tell. >> Yeah. >> And right now half of them are outside looking for a cab I think. That's the way it works here. Ryan Kroonenburg is also here. He's the founder of a company called A Cloud Guru. >> Yes. >> I like Ryan already. I liked him as soon as we met him because he said, "like the beer, Kroonenburg." So you resonated with the two of us, Ryan. >> Ryan like the airline and Kroonenburg like the beer. >> We appreciate that. Alright, so you're a cloud education company. >> Yes. >> And you bill yourself or at least in the conversation as you want to be the Netflix of cloud education. That's what you're doing. Tell us a little bit about the founding of the company. It began with your brother? >> Yes, yeah. >> Just two years ago and now you've grown to some 40 employees. >> Yeah, so I used to be a solutions architect and I was desperate to get a job at AWS so I became obsessed with getting trained in AWS. And at the time, a company I worked for had a training freeze. So we couldn't go out and do in-classroom training. If I had to do that myself, I'd have to pay for it myself. And I found that there wasn't a lot of good on-line training companies two years ago. I didn't get the job with AWS and turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. And so I decided to create my own course on AWS. Launched that, started going viral and that was the birth of A Cloud Guru. >> Ryan, bring is in a little inside of building the company, so you're not only teaching cloud, but you're built on cloud and not just any cloud, but using the LAN to server list from pretty early on that. >> Exactly, so we practice what we preach. You know, we are real AWS engineers. We built the entire platform serverlessly. We think we're the world's first serverless start-up. We're certainly the world's first serverless learning management system. So we don't pay for any servers whatsoever. There's no virtual/physical servers. And we're basically, purely AWS native. We do use a bunch of third party services like Xero and PayPal and things like that. But most of our platforms are AWS. >> Yeah, in the keynote this morning, Adrian Cockroft talked about Bustle, A New York based start-up that uses a lot of serverless, but you built the company before you even had funding and now you've got a little bit of funding. Can you give any insight? Do the investors looks at that and say, wow, this is a great model? >> Yeah, so we raised a decent series A. One of the founders of Warby Parker is on our board now so that's really exciting. A guy called Andy and he's helping us scale. One of the reasons we took funding was helping to scale. So our infrastructure scales automatically with AWS because it's built on Lambda and API Gateway. But we as a company are struggling to scale in like finding the right employees and all of that sort of thing, so that's where we're getting some help. >> Alright, what are you hearing from people taking your courses? What new things are they asking for? How are you expanding the scope of your offerings? >> Everyone is obviously very interested in AWS, but they also want to learn other cloud-computing platforms now, especially Azure, so we are expanding the scope of our content to do Azure as well as Guru. The other problem people are having is, AWS innovates so quickly. You know, there's like a thousand updates last year. There's 19 new updates last week. So there having trouble keeping up so we run just a weekly TV show called, AWS This Week, and we basically just tell people what's new this week. And the great thing about New York Summit is there's been like five or six announcements here so I'm going to be busy on Friday, filming. >> Is there any one particular area of training that you see more people drifting toward or following toward? >> I think serverless and big data are the hot topics. Big data, by that I mean AI, machine learning. That's just exploding right now. And just serverless architectures because the future of cloud is serverless. Why pay for virtual, physical machines by the hour or by the minute and have system administrators, network administrators, database administrators when all you actually want to focus on is your code and your end customers and serverless allows you to do that. >> So what's your process then? In terms of you staying on top of it, right? Because now you have to. >> Ryan: Yeah. >> I mean, you, you're it, right? You're the point of expertise. So how do you ... I guess, remain in that kind of relationship with AWS that you're the cusp? >> So, I obviously read all the blogs. Our students, We've got 300,000 students right now and our discussion forums are very very active so if they have announced something that I've missed, the students tell me, like, we'll know within a few hours. So, that's it really. It's just forever learning, but I love learning anyway so it's fun to get paid to learn. >> John: Sure. You bet. >> Ryan, how many people have gone through the training so far? Do you know how many of them get certified after they do that? And how many are kind of repeat customers? >> We've got 300,00 have gone through the training so far. We do track our pass rates. Our pass rates vary from anywhere between, normally 80 to 90%. Not everyone will pass on the first go because the exams are tough and it's also quite stressful. Sitting these exams can be quite stressful. In terms of the number of students that actually go on to get certified, that's not something we track just yet, but we're looking to change that as well. But yeah, we have a very good pass rate. >> So how does it work? I want to learn, you know, whatever. I want to dive into AI, whatever it is. I come to you, you've got something for me there right? You've got, I don't know how many hours of work I have to do, but take us through how it really works. >> Yeah so, it's video training. Online video training. So say you want to learn DynamoDB. We have a 19 hour course on that. And we go right into the very depths of DynamoDB. So you watch the videos. we'll show you what we're doing in the labs. We'll give you all the sample code if we're using code and then you can go and do it yourself. We very much believe in, the only way to learn Cloud is by getting your hands dirty. To actually go and do it yourself. So people watch the labs, do the stuff themselves and then complete the course. If it's a certification course, then at the end what they'll do is go and book the exam and hopefully, they'll pass the exam as well. >> So Ryan, you're in there looking at all this stuff, especially things like server lists. What are you looking for, for kind of the maturation? Is there anything that do you give feedback to Amazon? The community give you feedback? I have to imagine that there's some good feedback loops there? >> Yeah, I'm lucky enough to be an AWS community hero. So we get get briefed by Amazon on things that are coming out. You know, under MDA of course. We give a lot of feedback on that. No, I think serverless is the next big revolution. I hate hype and buzz words and things like that, but the thing about serverless is that, now you don't have to worry about servers. You can just focus on your code and you don't need to worry about any of the normal administration behind it and it's like ridiculously cheap. You get a million lambda implications a month for free. That's just part of Free Tier. We actually only just came off of Lambda Free Tier a couple of months ago and we've got 300,000 students. So, it's very very very cheap so its amazing. It's driving new revolution. >> What advice would you give to someone if they were looking to start a business and using serverless as a platform? >> Yeah, definitely check out AWS of course, we build our entire business off AWS. Design, try if you can, architect everything in a serverless fashion because like I keep saying, you don't have to worry about management of operating systems, virus patching, security, any of that. AWS, they take all... They take care of all of the heavy lifting for you. >> So I know you are a big fan of Lambda, but have you looked at some of the other serverless options out there? Is there any concern around, there's open source options out there. >> Ryan: Yeah. >> How do we get compatibility and not be just locked into Amazon? >> Azure Functions looks really good. See, this thing about vendor lock-in, I mean, you've got the serverless framework as well. If you build your applications on the serverless framework, you can move between platforms quite easily. That is coming so you could build it out on AWS and then move over to Azure if you wanted. The founder of serverless frameworks is a good friend of mine. So I definitely recommended checking it out. And that would be my advice. If you are going to go serverless use the serverless framework so then you don't have to worry about vendor lock in. But at the same time, Amazon, they reduce their prices all the time. So it is a good vendor to be with. >> I just think your story is great. I think that the best "no" you ever got in your life was from AWS. And now you're giving them a big "yes". >> Yeah, absolutely, I love AWS. They're such amazing people as well. They've all become my-- through my business and people I used to work with have all become really good friends of mine as well. It's been a great journey in last two years. >> You've done well for them, they've done well for you. It's a good relationship. >> Exactly. >> Ryan, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you. >> And continued success. >> Right, thanks guys. >> Good for you. You bet, Ryan Kroonenburg. The founder of A Cloud Guru. Along with his brother, Sam, making a pretty good business out of things on the AWS platform right now. Back with more here from AWS Summit, right after this. You're watching The Cube. (fast music)