.Serverless Summit 21 - Recap

One year ago our team sat down and came up with the crazy idea to organize a worldwide conference. The Serverless Summit has been born. 4 months later we have organized one of the world's largest conference for modern application development with serverless and we already started preparing the second iteration of it. This time with even crazier ideas and concepts. 😁

Therefore we would like to do a short recap, give you some insights behind the scenes and also some outlook for what you can expect this year. Excited? Let’s go!

So how did we get there?

Back in July we were following an online conference after work and started to think about organizing one of our own community events again. In jest, the idea of a global serverless conference came up. globaldatanet always tries to give something back to the community. No matter if it is some social media knowledge sharing, some contribution to community events or the organization of our own events, like the serverless beer tasting. Due to the pandemic over the last few years, almost all the events have been virtual. The amount of technical on-demand content nowadays is massive. Since the chances of organizing on-site events have been quite challenging, not to say impossible, we thought of creating our own online conference. But with a unique strategy.

Our mission!

Nowadays online conferences are mostly one-sided, and during the last 2 years, there has been a massive amount of online content available. Hence we wanted to create a conference which is different and unique. The principles we’ve defined at the very beginning are simple but very important for creating a unique online conference:

• Exciting & advanced content
• In every session, someone should be able to learn something new
• Create Value
• Community driven
• Interactivity
• Most important - Fun!

We also tried to create a mix of different session formats to deliver high variety and excitement.

The Tech Talks have been designed very short so it's possible to cover multiple topics during the conference and to focus on short sessions instead of listening to one Talk for more than one hour. Also important was to put high focus on the Q&A section in every Tech Talk, because this is the opportunity to interact with the community and get to the questions which are really interesting.

Of course, we also had several other formats like ask an expert, keynote, panel discussion or workshops. But our highlight definitely was the Serverless Awards. It’s just awesome to see people from the community on stage. We were impressed by the creativity of the solutions which have been handed in. Intelligent Doorbell to recognize people's faces at the door or saltwater fisherman helping you to improve your fishing… I guess I don’t have to say more.

How did it turn out?

If we are talking about numbers, the Serverless Summit was very successful. More than 2284 people registered for the event. Of course, not everybody is able to attend so we ended up with roughly 900 people who actively participated in the event. But more impressive was the engagement, the curiosity and the support from the whole community. And the crazy thing was, people from more than 70 countries all over the world joined in. 😱

Support

As we are talking about support, we were amazed by the support we received upfront and during the event. This Blogpost would last forever if I mention everyone who helped make this event happen. But still, we want to say a big thank you to our team, speakers, jury members, serverless experts, sponsors, organizers and many more. A special thanks goes to the community! Thanks to the AWS User Groups who shared the event all around the world, thanks to everyone who shared the event with his friends and thank you to everyone who joined in and followed the Serverless Summit. You are the reason why this was such a unique and awesome event.

Outlook

As mentioned in the very beginning we already have started the preparation for this year's event. And as promised we are back with a refreshed mind, new ideas, new concepts and of course a lot of experience. Here are some key points for this year's conference:

• Hybrid event - focus on online streaming with satellite streaming hot spots all around the world
• Quality Content - we will focus even more on exciting content, real-life use cases and hands-on talks
• New concepts - we will implement the lightning talks sessions. A format where people from the community can present some exciting tools or technologies in a 5-minute slot
• Same core principles - Create Value, Interactivity, Community-driven, Quality Content, Fun

The Serverless Summit 22 will happen on the 16th & 17th of November this year. So where to go from here? 🤔

• Follow our Serverless Summit Page to not miss any updates. 🚀
• If you wanna be part of the Summit as a speaker, you can simply apply here. 🗣

Stay safe & serverless! See you in November! 🙌