Serverless + Chatbots == Silver bullet for Startups?

Transcript

1. Serverless + Chatbots
   == Silver bullet for
   Startups?
   Ivan Čuljak
   @CuljakIvan / ivan@culjak.xyz
   

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2. A bit about me
   • Ivan Čuljak
   • Cloud Solutions Architect @ Celeste Maze
   • Shouting at clouds since 2012???
   • Salvaging wrecks/putting out fires for a living
   • Freelancer & Azure MVP
   

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3. Evolution of "app hosting" [1/2]
   • a shared server
   • a server
   • a farm of servers
   • VMs on a server
   • VMs on a farm of servers
   

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4. Evolution of "app hosting" [2/2]
   • VMs running containers
   • containers orchestrator running on top of VMs
   • let's just forget it's all there and do our dev job...
   

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5. What serverless is NOT
   • Execution model
   • Managed service
   • Operational construct
   • Spectrum
   • Technology
   Big tnx to Jeremy Daly for this <3
   

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6. Serverless IS a
   methodology
   Big tnx to Jeremy Daly for this <3
   

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7. Business shift
   All messed up
   • product strategy
   • design
   • budgeting
   • resource planning
   Big tnx to Jeremy Daly for this <3
   

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8. Current state of serverless
   

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9. Focus on core values
   "Outsource" everything else
   

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10. Less demand for mythical
    creatures
    

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11. Less experienced people can
    provide more value, and onboard
    faster
    

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12. Enough about the
    backend, where's the
    frontend?
    

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13. Are you completely
    sure the frontend has
    to be YOURS?
    

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14. UX/CX is crucial [1/2]
    • Spend as much time as you need to polish it
    • UX on a chatbot is more important than UX in mobile apps
    • It's hard for users to use their intuition to guess where
    you've hidden something
    

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15. UX/CX is crucial [2/2]
    • Don't bombard the user with information
    • Make everything simple and visual
    • Skip text entry as much as you can
    

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16. $$$
    • It's cheaper to develop
    • It's cheaper to maintain
    • It's cheaper to extend
    • It requires less skill to code
    

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17. Time
    • Initial time to market is lower
    • Time required for any change is lower
    • Deployments are available right away
    • There's no procedure for users to update
    

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18. Support
    • Your app not working on some random Chinese phone/
    tablet isn't your problem
    • If a user can't get it working it means that the messenger
    isn't working on their device
    • You can easily debug what's going on in each conversation
    • You can support multiple messengers
    

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19. Development
    • No special hardware required
    • No special subscriptions/licences required
    • You can handle almost everything from something like
    Visual Studio Code
    

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20. Testing
    • You can run tests on your dev machine, instead of
    automating them over a farm of mobile phones
    • If it works on one iPhone it will work on all of them
    • If it works on one Android it will work on most of them
    

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21. Deployment
    • There is no in-house/ad-hoc/enterprise/hidden builds/
    deployments
    • There's no need to download anything on the client side
    (except the messenger)
    • You basically deploy a web app if you're coding it, or you hit
    the save button if you're using some visual dev tool
    

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22. Analytics
    • All the analytics come from your backend, and hence you
    can easily collect them
    • There's no mobile app crash analytics that won't get to you,
    and hence you might miss them
    

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23. Use cases
    

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24. Fish app
    • Their MVP was based on WhatsApp... manually typing
    WhatsApp
    • Their budget was too small to build anything serious
    • Yet they were convinced they really need a mobile app for
    Android and iOS
    

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25. Checking codes app
    • Someone can register on a web site and get a code to
    redeem a package
    • Packages are being handed out by students
    • Students are using their own mobile phones
    • Viber to the rescue
    

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26. Getting a loan pre-approval
    • Chat with a bank bot to go through the loan questionaire
    • Get a pre-approval
    • Runs on functions
    • Cold starts and scaling "penalties" don't seem to matter to
    chat users :)
    

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27. Various startups
    • If you can think out-of-the-box
    • If you can "shift" the way society made you think
    • You could figure out that chatbots & serverless may solve
    your needs... at least for an MVP
    

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28. Thank you <3
    Any questions?
    @CuljakIvan / ivan@culjak.xyz
    

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