It was a very hot Saturday in Cracow on the 15th of June, not only because of temperature (36 degrees Celsius in the shade), but the fact that we conducted our first workshop this year on the Serverless topic, which is really hot these days. The Workshop is part of our initiative called natywnachmura.pl and together with the participants we built Serverless Cat Detector that was able to tell if in a given picture we have a cat or not.
What Is NatywnaChmura.pl?
Natywna Chmura, loosely translated CloudNative is our local initiative, that aims to provide very practical knowledge about cloud and cloud related technologies. We focus on topics like: Kubernetes, Serverless, Monitoring, CI/CD, DevOps best practices and a bit of Machine Learning. We are active both in Kraków and Silesia region at the moment. It is open for everybody, it is not limited to polish speakers only. This time we conducted workshop in English.
Why we do it?
Because… we love it! Sharing is in our veins, we do it internally every week and we do it externally via various conferences and meetups. We enjoy connecting with people, exchanging ideas and giving value to our participants.
Moreover, showing cloud technologies is a part of our identity, as a company our mission is to:
Improve your digital product performance, availability and cost efficiency with the guidance of our highly experienced and versatile cloud-native engineers.
We believe that cloud itself and cloud native technologies help building cost effective, efficient systems very quickly and as a result better and faster products.
How does it look like?
We reserve a place fo ~20 people and there are usually 3 of us. Why do we need 3 people? Our goal is to guide and walk-through every single participant through the exercise from the beginning until the end with success. When one of us is presenting, the rest is in the trenches helping out participants with all the issues that may arise during the workshop. That is also a reason why we aim at 20-25 people at max - with larger audience we wouldn’t be able to help everybody.
After the workshop people have a chance to leave us their email address, so we can send them workshop materials and guidance how to make next steps on given topic. There is a good news: we have also newsletter open to public where we share biweekly interesting stuff from the cloud computing world, to subscribe use this link: Newsletter.
Have we found any cats?
Yes! We found plenty of them. As you can probably infer from the name we built an application that checked whether uploaded file contains cat or not. Everything was built on top of AWS’ serverless technologies: Lambda, DynamoDB, Rekogntion, S3, API Gateway.
The flow was quite simple. Through UI user is able to upload image to S3. The newly created image is picked up by the lambda and sent to Rekognition. Classification results and status update are stored in the database. UI is able to fetch data from the Dynamo and display it.
Our goal was achieved, everybody had a fully working system in the end and we had a lot interesting discussion during the breaks.
What we plan in the future
We are going to continue for sure, you can expect next workshop in the following months. It is not the last time we teach you how to build Serverless Cat Detector, many people asked us about doing it again. Of courses we have other topics in the backlog like “Sagemaker in Practice”, “Introduction to Kubernetes” or “Monitoring with Datadog”. What is more we asked our audience to suggest topics that they are interested in. Stay tuned!
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