Serverless AND Containers

Presented at Serverlessconf 2019 New York City by Ahmet Alp Balkan (Developer Advocate, Google Cloud) and Donna Malayeri (Product Manager, Google Cloud)

Transcript

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3. CONTAINERS VS SERVERLESS
   and
   

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4. Donna Malayeri
   Product Manager, Google Cloud
   @lindydonna
   Ahmet Alp Balkan
   Developer Advocate, Google Cloud
   @ahmetb
   

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5. What do we agree on
   

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6. SERVERLESS > FUNCTIONS
   no ops
   fast autoscaling
   pay-per-use
   built-in security
   

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7. When we say "serverless," we're referring
   to services that run without the need for
   infrastructure provisioning and scaling,
   have built-in availability and security,
   and use a pay-for-valuebilling model.
   Serverless isn't just Lambda—it's the
   entire application stack.
   -Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com
   

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8. There are serverless containers.
   Google Cloud Run, Knative, AWS Fargate ...
   

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9. Functions vs Containers
   ⚔
   

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10. ABSTRACTION LAYER
    Runtime+infrastructure as commodity.
    Write snippets of code.
    Give up control over low-level details
    in favor of simplicity.
    Infrastructure as commodity.
    Write complete programs, packaged as "images"
    ● HTTP server
    ● Graceful termination, signal handling
    ● Concurrency control
    Access to low-level properties:
    ● OS/kernel options, network protocols
    ● build/compilation/runtime options
    FUNCTIONS CONTAINERS
    

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11. DEPENDENCIES & PATCHING
    Container images are:
    ● highly customizable
    ● hermetic and reproducible
    OS is patched by the platform
    Runtime patches require rebuild/redeploy.
    OS/Runtime patches provided by the platform.
    Can be customizable, if you can
    maintain a custom runtime.
    FUNCTIONS CONTAINERS
    

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12. LANGUAGE SUPPORT
    Supported language/versions are often limited.
    Maintain your custom runtime
    to have more languages/frameworks.
    FUNCTIONS
    Run any language/framework.
    (x86 application binary interface)
    Bring custom dependencies/libs, existing apps.
    CONTAINERS
    

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13. Method signature
    Invoked with a "harness" added by the platform.
    ● Payload: in-memory event object
    (event payload is already parsed)
    ● Response: in-memory object
    INVOCATION CONTRACT
    Fully executable program
    Invoked via proxy/load balancer.
    ● Payload: HTTP request
    (doesn't need an API Gateway)
    ● Response: HTTP response
    FUNCTIONS CONTAINERS
    

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14. But I hate docker and
    don't want to learn containers
    

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15. Debunking Container image myths
    1. You need to learn docker and write Dockerfiles to build container images
    → CNCF Buildpacks
    → Language-specific builders: ko (Go), Jib (Java), …
    2. Container images contain libraries/binaries you need to patch.
    → You can build minimal container images
    → static compilation, distroless
    

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16. VENDOR PORTABILITY
    Event objects are cloud/vendor specific
    Move horizontally or down.
    functions → functions
    functions → containers (Google functions-framework)
    Events are standardized via CloudEvents
    (a CNCF sandbox project).
    Hybrid-cloud:
    bare metal ⇔ VMs ⇔ Kubernetes ⇔ serverless
    FUNCTIONS CONTAINERS
    

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17. LOCAL TEST/DEV/DEBUG
    Write a test harness to invoke it locally.
    Learn and use serverless frameworks/SDKs
    FUNCTIONS CONTAINERS
    You write complete programs,
    which you can run locally.
    Use existing developer tools.
    (IDEs, profilers, debuggers, …)
    

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18. Containers can be serverless,
    but there are tradeoffs.
    control
    simplicity
    

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19. @ahmetb @lindydonna
    

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