Editor’s Note: This is mirrored from strongloop.com here.
Everything is bigger in Texas, and O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention 2017 was certainly no exception this year! Set right in the heart of Austin, Texas, OSCON was a meeting of some of the most powerful minds in software development, and as you would expect from Austin’s food scene, there was plenty of meat on the bone to digest.
When I went to IBM’s Interconnect a couple of months ago, I noted that people were becoming increasingly interested in ways to manage their API, rather than ways to actually roll an API. The secret seems to be out about Loopback, and OSCON reinforced the idea that API Management is currently all the rage. I spent time with Sai Vennam showing off our latest implementation of what ACME Freight uses to manage their shipping channels, and how they use Watson and OpenWhisk to help redirect shipments to safer locations in times of need. Suffice it to say, we had some people come and talk to us, and Sai noticed this about the foot traffic we had:
It was really exciting to see so many of the tech-savvy OSCON attendees flocking to our booth. Many came to play with the HTC Vive with Watson, a clear crowd-winner, but stayed to learn about our other tech.
Interestingly enough, with so much work and focus on the cloud and what people are deploying to it, there was one thing that seemed to catch onlookers’ attention more than most - OpenWhisk. Our team has been working really hard to show a bunch of different demos (such as LoopBack as a service using OpenWhisk, making powerful APIs with OpenWhisk, Open API Spec, and API Connect, and three webcasts in June), but it was interesting to really see how Serverless technology is really taking the cloud computing world by storm. I primarily come from a mobile development world, so seeing how easy and simple it is to basically deploy a function as a service is really invigorating. The attendees of OSCON largely agreed, as Sai also noticed:
Being at an open-source convention, attendees were glad to hear that IBM is working on serverless technology as an open-source project. The real kicker was when they saw how easy it was to start creating serverless functions right away!
It’s worth noting that our demo was somewhat of a gateway to the VR demo of Watson, and those who came to our booth were plenty happy to sit and chat with us anyway about API management with API Connect and OpenWhisk. Secure gateways are cool too!
OSCON is returning back to Portland next year in April 2018, and we’ll hopefully be there too to see what’s going on in the exciting world of containerization and API Management, as we continue our contributions to LoopBack.
What’s Next?
OSCON is returning back to Portland next year in April 2018, and we’ll hopefully be there too to see what’s going on in the exciting world of containerization and API Management, as we continue our contributions to Loopback. If you haven’t seen, Loopback can help you get an API up and running in 5 minutes - here’s how.