Serverless computing offers the opportunity to build and run web, Internet of Things and mobile applications without virtual or physical servers at a significantly reduced overhead cost. What’s not to like about that?

That’s the business philosophy embraced by Ryan Kroonenburg (pictured), founder of A Cloud Guru Ltd. The company offers cloud computing certification training for Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, and it prides itself on being at the forefront of the serverless revolution.

“We think we’re the world’s first serverless startup. We’re certainly the world’s first serverless learning management system,” Kroonenburg said.

The business model and education approach behind A Cloud Guru were discussed by Kroonenburg during his visit with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, at this week’s AWS Summit in New York City. They covered the company’s motivation for going serverless and why vendor lock-in was not a concern. (* Disclosure below.)

A TV show and 300,000 students

Founded less than two years ago, A Cloud Guru now has 300,000 students. In addition to cloud certification classes, the company also stays current on the latest AWS releases through its online TV program called “AWS This Week.”

The serverless model for A Cloud Guru was built using AWS Lambda (serverless computer) and API Gateway. “Why pay for virtual machines by the hour or by the minute?” asked Kroonenburg. “All you really want to focus on is your code and your end customers, and serverless allows you to do that.”

Lambda’s low cost was a key motivation for the startup company to pursue a serverless strategy. AWS currently prices the Lambda free tier at 1 million free requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. “It’s ridiculously cheap,” Kroonenburg said.

Despite growing concerns about consolidation and vendor lock-in within the cloud industry, Kroonenburg did not foresee a problem. “If you build your applications on the serverless framework, you can then move between platforms quite easily. You can build it out on AWS and then move over to Azure if you wanted,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is an unpaid media partner for AWS Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE