>> From the Regency Center in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Serverlessconf, San Francisco, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE here at Serverlessconf, 2018 in San Francisco. Happy to welcome to the program Michael Garski, who's the director of platform engineering at Fender. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me on. >> All right, so, luckily, I don't need to introduce Fender because I think most of our audience will be familiar with, you know, Fender, guitars, music, all that stuff, but we're going to talk a little bit about the tech side. >> Okay. >> Even though, let me ask, there's a question I usually ask. Most companies, you know, going through the digital transformation, lots of changes there. How does digital impact Fender? >> Digitally, Fender started a digital division in late 2015 and it was a focus on all-new digital products to complement our well-known physical products. Since then we've launched Fender Mod Shop, where a user can order a customized guitar online, have it delivered in a month. We have a single sign-on solution across all of our web and mobile applications, a guitar tuner, we have connected amplifiers, with companion apps to control amplifiers remotely. And our flagship product is Fender Play, which is an instructional app which allows the user to learn to play guitar, ukulele, and coming soon, bass. >> Love it. I'm guessing that has something to do with what you're involved with on the cloud and Serverless side to enable those technologies on the mobile side. >> Exactly. We've fully embraced AWS Lambda to support all of the services for the web and mobile applications. >> Okay, so A Cloud Guru's a training company and we've talked to them extensively as to why Serverless was a good fit for them, and enabled them to do it, but bring us through what led to your adoption of AWS Lambda, give us a little bit about what kind of technologies you were using before, and how you got to this solution. >> Well, we started out building services and go, just standard EC2 based microservices, and then we started tinkering a bit with Lambda. We had to adjust the product catalog from SAP. They could deliver a file, drop it into an S3 bucket, so it was simple enough to create a function that can process that file and ingest it into elastic search. From there, we used custom authorizers with API Gateway mapping templates to save custom tunings for users, and then as we started building for Tone and Play, Tone especially is a very limited audience. It's whoever buys the amplifiers. So we're not talking millions of people, it's going to be hundreds of thousands. So, it was a very good use case to go ahead and do that. Same thing with Play, we're starting a new business that's a great model for us, that we can just pay per usage. >> All right, so, yeah it sounds like you were using cloud and the usage model fit for what Serverless was built for, correct? >> Exactly, yes. >> All right, how much is management aware of, you know, kind of the underlying technology? Is your group, kind of just allowed free reign to kind of deal with this? Or are there anything you need to go to the CFO, and be like, well, you know our billings going to change a little bit compared to what you might have known in the past? >> It's, we pretty much have free reign. And our biggest AWS expense is actually what we pay for, in AWS Glacier for storage for the raw footage, of all the 4K footage from, instructional video shoots, and Lambda on top of that is simply a rounding error. >> Yeah, excellent. And the mobile apps that you've built, are there trials on there? Is everybody up to sign-up to be able to use it? Is it a freemium model or is it a paid model? >> The Tuner is a completely free application. There is an in-app purchase for cord and scale libraries, and some pro features of the tuner. Custom tunings are free. The Play application comes with a 30-day free trial, so user can sign up either on the web, or via the Google or Apple app stores on their mobile device. >> Okay, so, with that kind of model, I would think that Lambda would be nice. There's, you know, you said your expenses aren't that high using this kind of service. >> No, not at all, like I, in the month of June, we spent, I think it was like $132 for 68 million Lambda invocations. And to kind of put that in perspective a bit, it's what we pay for some EC2 services, EC2 instances that support our legacy authentication service, but we're also moving that over to Cognito now so we can get rid of all the EC2 instances. >> Okay, when you started using this technology, how'd you first learn about it? How'd you get up to speed on it? Tell us a little bit about kind of, training adoption. >> It was a lot of experimentation. So, we have it set up where we use one account for our QA and production environments and another account for our development environment. All the engineers on the team have free-reign to do whatever they want to in the development environment. They can spin up whatever they need to. So we just started playing around with things and experimenting. Like, let's hook up Lambda function to API Gateway, oh, this is going to work really well! And just kind of proceeded down that path. >> All right, great, and any learnings, anything that you tried playing with and said, like wow, this just isn't going to be a fit for what I need? Tell us, you know, what worked, what didn't? >> I would say about the only thing we found that really doesn't fit within Lambda and Serverless would be really very low latency applications. You're doing an auto complete for a search system. You want that snappy. It's, humans observe, I think it's about 100 milliseconds things seemed instantaneous, and that's going to be very challenging to get from API Gateway Lambda to get that consistently. >> Okay, great. And you're speaking here at the conference, how'd that end up happening, what are you looking to share with your peers? >> How it happened was I submitted a talk for a conference and then Drew from A Cloud Guru approached me and asked me to submit I had to tell him I already did, so they went ahead and approved it. And, I'm sharing what we've done and built at Fender Digital, and sort of what we found as far as tools for monitoring, performance optimization, as well as some things to really be cautious of when you're dealing with Lambda, especially with regards to concurrency controls. >> 'Kay, great and, how have you found the show so far? You were at the keynote, got about 500 people here. >> Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd really like the focus all on Serverless. You see, go to a lot of conferences, there might be one or two talks that kind of focus on that. It's nice to have something completely focused in that space. >> All right, and, you know, from a maturity standpoint, are there things that you're looking for in the roadmap from Amazon? They've been baking Serverless kind of into all of their services, so do you expect to stay on Lambda, or are there other services that kind of, you know FAZ or Serverless built into it that you might be using? >> We expect to stay on Lambda for the near term. I don't, we don't have any plans or looking at anything else like Azure or Google Cloud functions, our intention is to stay with AWS. They have a lot of other services, their new machine learning services, we use DynamoDB quite extensively, and so we're probably going to stick with them. >> Yeah, but inside Amazon, they've been expanding their Serverless portfolio as it was. >> Oh, yeah. >> And I remember, I was at the show when Lambda was announced, and then, you know it's Aurora with Serverless underneath and all those, so do you expect to adopt some of those other services that have AWS Serverless kind of baked into it as opposed to just using, kind of a Lambda tool. >> Absolutely, especially with, you just mentioned the Aurora Serverless model. That's one that we're taking a look at and evaluating as we've got some data in DynamoDB, but as requirements have shifted in the business over time it's really, it's becoming very difficult to model in DynamoDB, so we're going to kind of take a look at that, and possibly move to Aurora Serverless. >> I'm curious, how does Fender, does Fender think of the data involved? Is that something that, you mentioned AI, some of these, is that something that you'll be able to take the data and leverage that potentially even make new business revenue streams out of that in the future? >> We're doing some of that already by just watching user, analyzing user behavior so we can improve our products internally. And we're looking at adding more features to where we can really understand what people are doing, and then make our products better. >> All right. Michael, want to give you the final word. For your peers out there that might be saying hey, I've heard of Serverless, I'm kind of thinking at it, what advice would you give them? >> Just dive in, get started, don't hesitate. It's, it doesn't cost you anything, really to experiment with it. That model works very, very nice. >> Yeah, and it's one of the things that's great. It used to be you would take a lot of period of time and some big investment to be able to try a technology out or maybe you would get some demo, but Serverless is pretty easy to get started on. >> Exactly. Especially if you're using a framework like say, Serverless framework, or maybe using AWS. Excuse me, AWS's Serverless application model, it really helps as far as setting up all the resources that your function needs as well. >> All right well, Michael really appreciate you riffing with us on your deployments with Serverless and hope your peers will definitely check it out. All right, lots more coverage here from The Serverless Conference here in San Fransisco. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> 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)