The good the bad and the ugly of Serverless - CFS2025

Like most developers, we (Cecil Phillip and Burke Holland) have been curious, skeptical and admittedly more than just a bit confused about Serverless. So we decided to build something with it. Not just a demo; a real application used by real people. It was great fun, we learned a lot, and got banged up a little bit on the way.

In this talk you'll see how we built a full stack application using a serverless approach with Azure Functions. We'll show you some of the technical walls with an imprint of our faces still on them, and a few of the more "OMG" moments where Serverless really starts to make sense. This project was a lot of fun. It was also confusing and difficult - but the journey was worth it and we would love to share it with you.