When Sam Kroonenburg (pictured) and his brother were looking to build an online school that would teach cloud computing, there were platforms for hosting teaching content, but they took a hefty cut out of what could well be meager profits. So Kroonenburg cancelled a family vacation, locked himself in a relative’s home for four weeks, and built the foundation of what became a thriving business called A Cloud Guru Ltd using the fastest model he had available — serverless computing.

“There was no epiphany to go serverless; there was no grand plan. I had no time to build this thing. I saw that it would help me build this faster and I could get something to market in the four weeks that I had,” said Kroonenburg, co-founder of A Cloud Guru.

Kroonenburg shared his memories of the early days during a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, in conversation with host Stu Miniman (@stu) during the ServerlessConf in New York City. They discussed how the serverless computing model helped get the company off the ground and ways that the industry has matured over the past two years.

AWS Lambda paved the way

At the time that A Cloud Guru was launched, Amazon had only recently released Lambda, a new way to build applications in the cloud without provisioning or managing a server. The pay-only-for-what-you-need in-cloud support feature of Lambda and not having to manage a cloud infrastructure were tailor-made for starting a new company.

“Our business would not exist if it wasn’t for serverless technologies,” Kroonenburg said.

The new cloud-training business soon took off. A Cloud Guru now has 300,000 students and recently closed a $7 million financing round. In the space of two years, the company has experienced steady growth, while the serverless computing ecosystem has matured around it.

“It’s a lot easier to get into now than it was two years ago,” Kroonenburg said. “There’s great deployment tools and orchestration systems that have come along.”

The gathering in NYC represented Kroonenburg’s fifth foray into conference events, and the presence of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM showed that serverless computing had become a bigger force over time.

“We get great thought leaders from the community,” Kroonenburg said. “It’s vendor neutral, and it’s really cool.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ServerlessConf event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE