Community: Serverless Toronto
Eight years of closing the gap between IT and the business
Serverless Toronto: free education for IT pros, technical co-founders, and product people who build, since 2018. 6,000+ members, 80+ recorded sessions, and one question asked of every topic: why does this matter to the business now?
The most-watched session in eight years
How I Use Claude Code to Ship Like a Team of 5 - Enterprise Workflow Live (2025)
Why it exists
I registered the group on Meetup on my birthday in February 2018, with one mission I have not changed since: reduce the gap between IT and business needs. Serverless was the technology that looked like the gap-closer that year.
In 2019 Ben Kehoe (then at iRobot, now a Distinguished Engineer at Siemens and an AWS Serverless Hero) named it the serverless mindset: the point is focus, he wrote, not the technology; own nothing that is not core to delivering your business value. That freed the group to follow the wave. Nobody planned the eras below; whatever came over the IT radar toward a business interest got a session.
How the sessions get chosen
I curate; I bring the people who know. The topics come from real problems my clients are trying to solve, the presenters are chosen because they have the credentials for that topic, and the recurring question is why it matters now. 8+ years of the same recipe: a real problem, the right guest, a short talk, and a room full of questions. The guest is the star; the questions are the point.
The topics at the Serverless Meetups gave me the confidence to take on new challenges.
Abhishek SainiCIBC, LinkedIn recommendationEight eras, one thread
2018-2019
Serverless foundations
Algolia: simpler, faster alternative to Elasticsearch & Solr Search Engines
Core AWS and serverless patterns, event-driven architectures, and CI/CD for serverless applications.
The era's highest-viewed session looked past AWS entirely, at a faster alternative to Elasticsearch and Solr.
2020
Serverless meets Kubernetes and SRE
Where Serverless meets Containers - Kelsey Hightower on Cloud Run
The pandemic year widened the lens: containers alongside serverless, and the first SRE sessions.
The pick is Kelsey Hightower on Cloud Run, the runtime that carries the group's agents-to-production sessions six years later.
2021
Multi-cloud and data platforms
Get started with Dialogflow & Contact Center AI on Google Cloud
AWS, Azure, and GCP compared side by side, plus early data-lake and ML-platform talks.
The era's highest-viewed session was on conversational AI for contact centers, years before agents became the industry word for it.
2022
Data engineering and analytics maturity
Retail Analytics & BI with Looker, BigQuery, GCP and Leigha Jarett
Batch and streaming pipelines, customer data platforms, and data reliability engineering as its own discipline.
The era's highest-viewed session covered retail analytics and BI on the modern Google Cloud data stack.
2023
Modern data stack and the first GenAI talk
Saddling the Generative AI Wild Horse with David Shapiro
Peak modern-data-stack framing, and mid-year the group's first Generative AI session: the pivot point.
The pick is that first GenAI talk, months before the wave; the year's most-watched session was still dimensional modelling.
2024
The LLM and RAG transition
All in AI: LLM Landscape & RAG in 2024 with Mark Ryan (Google) & Jerry Liu (LlamaIndex)
The group visibly reoriented around LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation.
The era's highest-viewed session mapped the LLM landscape with a Google engineer and LlamaIndex's founder.
2025
Agentic AI and enterprise LLM operations
How I Use Claude Code to Ship Like a Team of 5 - Enterprise Workflow Live
Enterprise-grade LLM reliability, RAG in production, agent protocols, and securing agent infrastructure.
The era's highest-viewed session, and the highest-viewed in the group's history, was a live coding-agent workflow.
2026
The agentic OS era
Building an AI Agent from Scratch: Manning Book Walkthrough with Val Andrei Fajardo
Agents shipped to production, market validation for AI ideas, and what your edge is once AI can code.
The year-to-date highest-viewed session walked through building an agent from scratch, book in hand.
Bring the next session into your company
I also run this kind of session inside companies: a talk built for the room, then an open discussion. Same recipe as the meetup, your problem instead of mine, and the questions stay in your room. No pitch on the day.
Book a scoping callBook a scoping call
30 minutes, no pitch: bring your messiest AI question and I will give you a straight answer.