Kalix: Tackling the The Cloud to Edge Continuum

Read this blog for an overview of Kalix:
https://www.kalix.io/blog/kalix-move-to-the-cloud-extend-to-the-edge-go-beyond

Abstract:
What will the future of the Cloud and Edge look like for us as developers? We have great infrastructure nowadays, but that only solves half of the problem. The Serverless developer experience shows the way, but it’s clear that FaaS is not the final answer. What we need is a programming model and developer UX that takes full advantage of new Cloud and Edge infrastructure, allowing us to build general-purpose applications, without needless complexity.

What if you only had to think about your business logic, public API, and how your domain data is structured, not worry about how to store and manage it? What if you could not only be serverless but become “databaseless” and forget about databases, storage APIs, and message brokers?

Instead, what if your data just existed wherever it needed to be, co-located with the service and its user, at the edge, in the cloud, or in your own private network—always there and available, always correct and consistent? Where the data is injected into your services on an as-needed basis, automatically, timely, efficiently, and intelligently.

Services, powered with this “data plane” of application state—attached to and available throughout the network—can run anywhere in the world: from the public Cloud to 10,000s of PoPs out at the Edge of the network, in close physical approximation to its users, where the co-location of state, processing, and end-user, ensures ultra-low latency and high throughput.

Sounds exciting? Let me show you how we are making this vision a reality building a distributed real-time Data Plane PaaS using technologies like Akka, Kubernetes, gRPC, Linkerd, and more.

Transcript

1. Tackling the
   

   The Cloud to Edge
   Continuum
   Jonas Bonér
   

   @jboner
   

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2. Today’s
   
   
   Cloud Infrastructure is
   
   
   Great
   

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3. Today’s
   
   
   Cloud Infrastructure is
   
   
   Complex
   

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4. …the options
   can be
   overwhelming
   CNCF: Cloud Native Interactive Landscape - https://landscape.cncf.io/
   

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5. Are You Stuck
   

   with an enterprise stack
   

   where you have to manage
   

   Everything Yourself?
   Load Balancer
   Ingress Router
   Cache Cache
   Your App Your App
   Event Broker
   Database Database
   Cache Cache
   Your App Your App
   Event Broker
   Database Database
   

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6. The Promise of the
   Serverless DX
   

   is Revolutionary
   

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7. ZeroOps
   Means Less
   Complexity
   Your Function
   Your Function
   Your Function
   Your Function
   Cache
   Database
   Event Broker
   

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8. …but can quickly
   become a complex
   integration project
   Even if all
   the APIs are
   
   
   Serverless
   themselves
   

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9. Can we do be
   tt
   er?
   
   
   What lies beyond Serverless?
   

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10. The need for Vertical Integration
    There are already too many primitives for engineers to deeply
    understand and manage them all, and more arrive by the day.
    
    
    And even if that were not the case, there is too little upside for the
    overwhelming majority of organizations to select, implement,
    integrate, operate and secure every last component or service.
    
    
    Time spent managing enterprise infrastructure minutiae is time not
    spent building out its own business.
    “
    Stephen O’Grady, RedMonk
    Vertical Integration: The Collision
    of App Platforms and Database
    

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11. Civilization advances by extending the
    number of important operations which we
    can perform without thinking of them.
    “
    Alfred North Whitehead
    

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12. Self-Managed On-Prem
    Application
    Business Logic
    Frameworks
    Database
    Transport
    Security
    Infrastructure
    Kubernetes
    Operating System
    Virtualization
    Servers, Storage,
    Networking
    In the Cloud
    Kubernetes
    Operating System
    Virtualization
    Servers, Storage,
    Networking
    Application
    Business Logic
    Frameworks
    Database
    Transport
    Security
    Infrastructure
    What We Need
    Application
    Business Logic
    Frameworks
    Database
    Transport
    Security
    Kubernetes
    Operating System
    Virtualization
    Servers, Storage,
    Networking
    Infrastructure
    From Serverless to Databaseless
    Managed by Cloud /
    Service Provider
    Customer
    Managed
    

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13. Edge Computing
    Edge Computing is actually being implemented today in many
    of our clients’ environments, […] enabling entirely new
    applications and data models.
    
    
    Simply put, Edge has moved from concept and hype into
    successful vertical industry implementations, with general
    purpose platform status approaching rapidly.
    “
    Bob Gill
    

    Gartner (Oct. 2021)
    

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14. The Edge is already here
    • Telco, Cloud, and CDN companies are building out the infrastructure
    
    
    • 5G and Local-first software is changing the game
    
    
    • Customers demand that we move data and compute closer to end-user—
    for lower latency, better availability, and more advanced use-cases
    
    
    • We are moving beyond edge computing—towards stateful and a holistic
    view on data and compute
    
    
    • Huge market on the rise: $4.6B in 2020 to $61.1B (CAGR 38.4%) - Gartner
    It’s just not fully leveraged
    

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15. Edge use-cases
    • Autonomous vehicles
    
    
    • Retail & E-commerce
    
    
    • Trading systems
    
    
    • Health care
    
    
    • Emergency services
    
    
    • Factories
    
    
    • Stadium events
    

    (sport, concerts)
    
    
    • Gaming
    
    
    • Farming
    
    
    • Financial services
    
    
    • Smart homes
    
    
    • And more…
    

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16. Tsunami Warning
    • Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of enterprise-generated data
    will be created & processed on the Edge (10% today)
    
    
    • This requires:
    
    
    • Keeping as much data on the Edge as possible
    
    
    • Move processing to the Edge
    
    
    • Benefits:
    
    
    • Real-time processing, lower latency, faster answers
    
    
    • Resilient, not relying on stable connection to cloud
    
    
    • More resource efficient, less data shipping
    https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/what-edge-computing-means-for-infrastructure-and-operations-leaders
    

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17. Hierarchical Layers
    from Cloud to Device
    Opportunities
    and limitations
    Further out (towards devices):
    
    
    • 10,000s to 100,000s of PoPs to coordinate
    
    
    • Unreliable networks & hardware
    
    
    • Limited resources & compute power
    
    
    • Real-time, low latency processing
    
    
    • Needs weaker consistency/guarantees
    
    
    • Local, faster, less accurate decisions
    
    
    • More resilient & available
    
    
    • Requires
    fi
    ne-grained data replication
    

    and mobility
    Further in (towards cloud):
    
    
    • 10s to 1000s of nodes to coordinate
    
    
    • Reasonably reliable networks & hardware
    
    
    • Vast resources & compute power
    
    
    • Batch, high latency processing
    
    
    • Allows stronger consistency/guarantees
    
    
    • Global, slower, but “better” decisions
    
    
    • Less resilient & available
    
    
    • Coarse-grained data replication possible,
    

    data can be stationary
    

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18. Technical Requirements
    • Autonomous self-organising components
    
    
    • Physical co-location of data, compute, end-user
    
    
    • Intelligent and adaptive placement of data, compute, end-user
    
    
    • Local-first cooperation (function just fine without backend cloud)
    
    
    • Fine-grained and adaptive replication (row-level)
    
    
    • Consistency a la carte—Eventual, Causal, Strong
    
    
    • Options for “state models” (“shapes”)—SQL, Event Sourcing, CRDTs,
    

    Views, Streaming
    
    
    • End-to-end guarantees of SLAs, business rules, and data integrity
    

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19. My vision of a
    • Cloud to Edge is a continuum
    
    
    • Powering location transparent services that can run anywhere
    

    –from public Cloud to 100,000 of PoPs at the Edge
    
    
    • Should not be a design, development, or even deployment decision
    
    
    • Data always exists wherever and whenever needed, and only for the time it is needed
    
    
    • Data and compute moves adaptively, together with the end-user
    
    
    • Data is always co-located with processing and end-user
    

    —ensuring ultra low latency, high throughput and resilience
    
    
    • Data is injected into the services on an as-needed basis
    

    —automatically, timely, efficiently, and intelligently
    Cloud to Edge Data Plane
    

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20. Freedom is not so much the absence
    of restrictions as finding the right
    ones, the liberating restrictions.
    “
    Timothy Keller
    

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21. Distilling the Ultimate
    Cloud to Edge Programming Model
    1. Data model
    
    
    • How to model the business data
    
    
    • Its structure, constraints, guarantees, and query model
    
    
    2. API
    
    
    • How to communicate/coordinate services and outside world
    
    
    3. Business logic
    
    
    • How to mine intelligence, act, and operate on the data
    
    
    • Transform, downsample, relay, and trigger side-effects
    
    
    • Using work
    fl
    ow, point-to-point, pub-sub, streaming, broadcast
    The rest can (and should) be fully managed and automated
    by the underlying platform
    3 things we as developers can never delegate:
    

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22. • Fully managed developer PaaS—for building real-time event-driven Cloud Native
    and Edge Native applications
    
    
    • Beyond Serverless—abstracts away ALL infrastructure into a single declarative
    programming model (DB, event broker, cache, API gateway, service mesh, security, …)
    
    
    • Polyglot—use it from Java, Javascript, Typescript, Scala, Python, Go, and more
    
    
    • Unifies Cloud Native and Edge Native development in a Cloud-to-Edge Data Plane
    
    
    • Reactive at its core—low latency, high throughput, always available, adaptive scaling,
    co-location of data and compute (built on Akka, gRPC, Kubernetes)
    

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23. Application
    Business Logic
    Frameworks
    Database
    Transport
    Security
    Infrastructure
    Kubernetes
    Operating System
    Virtualization
    Servers, Storage,
    Networking
    Kalix
    Kubernetes
    Operating System
    Virtualization
    Servers, Storage,
    Networking
    Application
    Business Logic
    Frameworks
    Database
    Transport
    Security
    Infrastructure
    Application
    Business Logic
    Frameworks
    Database
    Transport
    Security
    Kubernetes
    Operating System
    Virtualization
    Servers, Storage,
    Networking
    Infrastructure
    Vertical Integration As a Service
    Managed by Cloud /
    Service Provider
    Customer
    Managed
    

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24. How do you build a service?
    3
    2
    1
    State model
    API description Business logic
    

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25. Step 1: Define API and data
    service ShoppingCart {
    rpc AddItem(AddLineItem) returns (google.protobuf.Empty) {
    option (google.api.http) = {
    post: "/ShoppingCart/cart/{user_id}/items/add",
    body: "*",
    };
    
    
    }
    
    
    …
    }
    message AddLineItem {
    string user_id = 1 [(kalix.field).entity_key = true];
    string product_id = 2;
    }
    option (kalix.method).eventing = {
    
    
    in: { event_log: "shopping-cart" }
    
    
    out: { topic: "shopping-cart-events" }
    
    
    };
    Schema-
    fi
    rst: Declarative con
    fi
    guration in Protobuf
    

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26. Step 2: Define state model
    option (kalix.codegen) = {
    
    
    value_entity: {
    
    
    …
    
    
    }
    
    
    }
    rpc GetCarts(GetCartsRequest) returns (stream Carts) {
    
    
    option (kalix.method).view = {
    
    
    query: "select * from carts where userid = :userid"
    
    
    };
    
    
    }
    
    
    …
    
    
    option (kalix.codegen) = {
    
    
    event_sourced_entity: {
    
    
    …
    
    
    }
    
    
    }
    option (google.api.http) = {
    
    
    get: "/carts"
    
    
    };
    

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27. Step 3: Write business logic
    // Tie the gRPC service to a JS function
    
    
    entity.setBehavior(cart => {
    

    return {
    
    
    commandHandlers: {
    
    
    AddItem: addItem,
    
    
    }
    
    
    });
    
    
    
    
    // Business logic
    
    
    function addItem(addItem, cart, ctx) {
    
    
    console.log("addItem", addItem);
    
    
    }
    
    
    Event
    State
    Context
    Event and State injected into the function
    Choose language and write the function
    

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28. State is injected into the function on an as-needed basis
    Event In
    User Function
    Deployment
    Event Out
    State In State Out
    

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29. If the Function manages the state, It is A
    
    
    Black BoX
    
    
    To the runtime
    The Problem
    

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30. The Problem
    Unconstrained database access
    
    
    Makes it hard to Automate
    
    
    operations
    

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31. Under the hood
    Execution cluster
    Project
    Service
    State proxy User code
    Linkerd
    

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32. In Summary
    Cloud development is too complex
    
    
    • Serverless is promising, but currently falls short
    
    
    • We need to continue to climb the ladder of abstractions
    
    
    • We need Vertical Integration not an integration project
    
    
    Edge Computing is already here
    
    
    • Opens up a new world of possibilities and challenges
    
    
    • We need to see Cloud and Edge as a continuum
    
    
    • Apps soon need to be both Cloud Native and Edge Native
    
    
    • We need to a new Programming Model and DX
    

    designed to serve this Cloud to Edge continuum
    
    
    Kalix is here to help:
    
    
    • Polyglot, real-time, event-driven, reactive, zero-ops PaaS
    
    
    • Adaptive, resilient, and scalable Cloud-to-Edge Data Plane
    
    
    • Use it in the Cloud today, but be ready for future Edge use-cases
    

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33. Thank You
    Learn more at kalix.io
    

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