Towards Sustainable Ecosystems for Cloud Functions

The main technologies around modern cloud development and deployment paradigms such as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) environments follow a typical technology life-cycle. Starting with basic code installation and execution environments, they unfold into a complete ecosystem with rich collaborative development and market enablement tools. In this paper, we analyse the growth of such ecosystems, reveal causes of hindrances in previous service-oriented approaches, and present our vision of how an ecosystem with sustainable operation could look like both in general and specifically for cloud functions. We present Func-
tion Hub, a partial prototypical implementation to gain first knowledge about the potential operational ecosystem behaviour.

Transcript

1. Towards Sustainable Ecosystem for Cloud Functions Authors: Yessica Bogado - Itaipu Technological Park Walter Benitez - Itaipu Technological Park Josef Spillner - ZHAW School of Engineering Fabio López-Pires - Itaipu Technological Park
2. CONTENT 2 1. Challenges 2. Ecosystem Analysis, obstacles. 3. Proposition 4. Sustainable Ecosystem Elements Marketplaces, Converters, Deployers, Execution Environments 5. Proof of Concepts Function Hub 6. Conclusion
3. 3 1. CHALLENGES
4. 4 Technology-Specific Exchanges But.. . Who operates such exchange in a sustainable way? Which future exchanges will emerge for new technologies such as cloud functions? How these future exchanges may look like?
5. 5 2. ECOSYSTEM
6. 6 What is an Ecosystem? Growth through contribution Ecosyste m Service- oriented element s Tools for Providers and Consumers
7. 7 Growth Ecosystem The dependent products grow slower with logarithmic relation compared than the independent products.
8. 8 Ecosystem Obstacles 1. Single Commercial Owners 2. Concentration of providers in ecosystems
9. 9 Cloud Function Ecosystem In Serverless architecture, cloud providers have complete management over the environment in which functions run.
10. 10 3. PROPOSITION
11. 11 Proposition Establish Sustainable Ecosystems for heterogeneous application development artefacts which can be customised for arbitrary domains. How? Decentralisation Guarantees that in the worst case the system will continue to function in reduce form. Abstraction Converting formats and protocols.
12. 12 4. SUSTAINABLE ECOSYSTEM ELEMENTS
13. 13 Marketplaces Environment where developers could interact with the platform ecosystem in a way that allows them to create, share and trade tools. Enabling users to deploy, scale and create functions more easily and efficiently. Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments
14. 14 Converters Users are forced to create functions for specific cloud providers instead of a general one. Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Converter Function
15. 15 Deployers Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments The users need a flexible tool that allow them to deploy their functions on multiple cloud environments. Specific platform Multi-Tenancy
16. 16 Execution Environments Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Each cloud provider focuses its environment in accordance to an aimed developer group or their specific infrastructure.
17. 17 Similar Ecosystem
18. 18 5. PROOF OF CONCEPTS
19. 19 Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments FunctionHub
20. 20 Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Marketplaces FunctionHub allows free exchange of functions between users and generates the required environments for a serverless market to proliferate. Decentralisation Abstraction Extensible Mesaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) Snafu
21. 21 Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Marketplaces
22. 22 Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Converters As a early prototype, a converter of Python functions was developed to add wrappers for different modules that the file could have. Converter Wrapp 1 Wrapp 2 Wrapp 4 Wrapp 3 Function
23. 23 Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Deployers Snafu give users the option to upload their functions from their repositories to the Function Hub ecosystem. For deploy functions from Function Hub to a private cloud provider is intended to use the Serverless Framework.
24. 24 Marketplaces Converters Deployers Execution Environments Execution Environments Snafu Docker Image Runtime environments • Python 3.5 Python 2.7 JRE Node.js
25. 25 6. CONCLUSION
26. 26 Conclusion The rapid growth of Serverless Computing creates a need for an ecosystem in order to bring users necessary tools for a fast and cheap deployment of their software. It is needed properties like decentralisation and abstraction that allows users to create applications that interact with a diverse cloud ecosystem and take advantage of this diversity according to their needs.
27. THANKS yessica.bogado@pti.org.py walter.benitez@pti.org.py fabio.lopez@pti.org.py josef.spillner@zhaw.ch 27