Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast!

In May, I published a short episode of the podcast about my daughter Olivia being diagnosed with leukemia. It's been a rough couple of months, but I wanted to share how things are going, what the plan is, and give a tremendous thank you to the community.

Have you ever wished you could quit your job and go create content all day long while working for yourself? You can! In this episode, Yan Cui joins Allen Helton to talk about full-time content creation and consultancy within the serverless world. The two discuss Yan's journey to greatness, weigh in on the use of generative AI when it comes to content, and cover tips and tricks to get better en...

I recently had a significant life event that has turned my world upside down. In this bonus episode, I share the story and let you know what you can do to help. Blog post: https://readysetcloud.io/blog/allen.helton/a-personal-update GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-olivias-fight-against-leukemia

You've probably seen some posts lately about the Believe in Serverless community. If you've been wondering what it is and why there's so much noise around it - great news! This episode is all about the community including what it is, where it's been, what it has to offer, and where it's going. Join Allen and four of the community champions, Ben Pyle, Danielle Heberling, Andres...

There's no question that tech is booming all over the world. But how has it been received in places that have harder access to the internet, like Africa? Join Allen as he talks with Tobenna Nwokike about how technology is transforming Nigeria into something completely new. They discuss the cultural and economic changes brought on by tech, how easy it is to break into the field, the assistance...

When was the last time you attended an event? It was probably virtual, right? Why is that? The tech industry has moved more and more virtual the past few years and we're starting to slowly but surely crawl our way back to in-person. In this episode, Raphael Manke and Allen Helton talk about their experiences with getting together in person and how it compares to virtual events. They talk about...

Event-driven architectures (EDA) is an intimidating subject for many, but don't confuse complexity with unfamiliarity. While EDA might seem unnecessarily complex, it's a necessary architectural pattern as the world goes more and more distributed. Join James Eastham and Allen Helton as they discuss all things EDA, ranging from what to put in your events to how EDA compares to request/respon...

Join Johannes and Allen as they talk about the world of modern CI/CD. The duo describes exactly what CI/CD is and is not and how your pipeline might be a bit more involved than you think. Johannes shares what he considers "the best" pipeline in the industry today, describes his experience with Amazon Code Catalyst, and goes into detail about a project he's working on to make pipeline...

They say the best way to learn is by doing, but is that always true? Does the way people effectively learn change the further they get into their career? Join Luc and Allen as they discuss continuing education as a developer and what they've experienced over the last decade. The two cover the benefits of side projects and the impact taking them to production has both from a learning perspectiv...

Join Allen Helton and Jeremiah Dunham as they explore math in the world of computer science. Do developers use it as much as they thought they would or is it abstracted away to a point where we have no idea? What if there was a way to use math to prove the correctness of your code instead of writing unit tests? Guess what? It's possible. Tune into the episode as Allen and Jeremiah talk about t...

The serverless community loves talking about serverless. Despite the amazing innovations happening all around us, we still talk about cold starts and scalability like they are new. But what if we didn't? What would it take to get to a post-serverless era? What does post-serverless even mean? Join Jeremy Daly and Allen Helton as they discuss what the future holds for serverless and how the game...

Have you ever wondered how it works when you tell Alexa to turn off your lights and you're suddenly sitting in darkness? The Internet of Things (IoT) is all around us - from automating smart homes to alerting us when an industrial piece of equipment is malfunctioning. Join Allen and Rohan Desai as they discuss how SmartThings integrates hundreds of devices from different vendors to provide a r...

If you've been around the serverless community for any length of time, you've undoubtedly heard of Serverless Guru. But do you know what they do? Listen to Sam Lock and Allen discuss the day-in and day-out of being a serverless developer, cover the emerging importance of automating boilerplate code, and of course, dive into generative AI. About Sam Sam is a serverless developer for Serverl...

What's the difference between developer advocacy, tech evangelism, and solutions architecture? A few years ago, all these job titles would have sounded made up. But in the mad rush we know as "cloud development", each of them have distinct roles and importance. Join Michael "Focus Otter" Liendo and Allen Helton as they dive into what makes developer advocacy unique and rele...

Have you ever wondered why querying your data lakes were so slow? Or, if you're like Allen, did you ever wonder what a data lake actually is? Join Cliff Crosland as he explains how the Scanner team has changed data lakes forever by going serverless. This episode is a showcase of some brilliant engineering to solve a problem in a serverless manner. About Cliff Cliff is the CEO and co-founder of...

Feature flags are much more than on/off switches to hide in-progress features. They separate releases from your deployments. They allow you to slowly roll out features to your user base. They give you access to easy A/B testing. Join Steve and Allen as they talk about the impressive capabilities of AWS AppConfig, a managed service that controls your feature flags and powers many of the AWS service...

Are you cloud certified? In this episode of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast Ro Ndimofor stands his ground on a hard-hitting stance against certifications. Enjoy the classic debate of "practice vs theory" as Ro and Allen discuss alternatives to certifications and if there really is a place for them in your career. About Ro Ro is a software developer and an AWS Serverless Hero who loves crea...

Java is notorious for slow cold starts in Lambda. But why? What can you do to make them faster? Is it time to ditch Python and make your way to the JVM? Join Vadym and Allen as they talk about Java's journey in serverless and explore some of the optimization techniques developers use to mitigate cold starts like Snap Start, priming, and using GraalVM. About Vadym Vadym Kazulkin is Head of Deve...

Have you ever wondered how MidJourney or ChatGPT work? Generative AI has taken the world by storm with millions of adopters using it daily. But how does it work? How does it go from a question you type in a dialog box to a meaningful answer or perfectly drawn image on screen? Join Matt and Allen as they discuss how completion models work, explain the differences between Generative AI and "reg...

Many people say DevOps is dead with the introduction of serverless. Responsibilities change from infrastructure management to platform engineering. But what happens when you throw generative AI into the mix? How does this shake up what we now know as DevOps and what does it hold for the future? Is DevOps going to die? Omkar and Allen talk about the human aspect of DevOps and debate if this will st...

Serverless services make it incredibly easy to start building. They reduce time to market, improve uptime (generally), and lower overall costs when starting up. But there's an entire world to consider before going serverless that most of us forget about - business operations. Aside from shifting ownership from hardware to software, you also have roles that need reassignment, an organizational...

Anyone who's heard of serverless has heard of cold starts. But have you heard about proactive initialization? This is a newly published service enhancement from the AWS Lambda team that pre-warms execution environments of on-demand functions. This enhancement results in reduced cold start times and costs consumers no extra money to take advantage of. In this short bonus episode, Allen and AJ t...

In the serverless world, we sometimes take the word "managed" a little too seriously. We often forget that not ALL software responsibilities are taken over by cloud vendors. Oftentimes responsibilities are shared between builders and cloud vendors, like security. In this episode, Allen and Jason talk about ways to improve your security posture starting today. They dive deep into AWS orga...

People throw around the phrase "app modernization" and "cloud migration" far too often. What do they mean? Are they the same thing? In this episode, Allen sits down with Alex Kearns to navigate the twists and turns of the cloud to find out the answer. The two talk about different strategies of modernization like the strangler pattern and learn how it's transforming the way...

The tech community is not just about networking or acquiring new skills - it's about discovery and mutual growth brought on by impactful interactions. Often seen as an mysterious black box, Allen and Jonah dive in to clarify some of the confusion around the tech community. First of all, what is it? How do you start on your own journey? And most importantly, how can you participate and contribu...