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
   

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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
   

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3. 3
   1.
   CHALLENGES
   

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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?
   

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5. 5
   2.
   ECOSYSTEM
   

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6. 6
   What is an Ecosystem?
   Growth
   through
   contribution
   Ecosyste
   m
   Service-
   oriented
   element
   s
   Tools for
   Providers and
   Consumers
   

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7. 7
   Growth Ecosystem
   The dependent products grow
   slower with logarithmic relation
   compared than the independent
   products.
   

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8. 8
   Ecosystem Obstacles
   1. Single Commercial Owners
   2. Concentration of providers in
   ecosystems
   

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9. 9
   Cloud Function Ecosystem
   In Serverless architecture, cloud
   providers have complete
   management over the
   environment in which functions
   run.
   

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10. 10
    3.
    PROPOSITION
    

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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.
    

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12. 12
    4.
    SUSTAINABLE
    ECOSYSTEM
    ELEMENTS
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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.
    

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17. 17
    Similar Ecosystem
    

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18. 18
    5.
    PROOF OF
    CONCEPTS
    

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19. 19
    Marketplaces
    Converters
    Deployers
    Execution
    Environments
    FunctionHub
    

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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
    

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21. 21
    Marketplaces
    Converters
    Deployers
    Execution
    Environments
    Marketplaces
    

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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
    

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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.
    

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24. 24
    Marketplaces
    Converters
    Deployers
    Execution
    Environments
    Execution Environments
    Snafu
    Docker Image
    Runtime
    environments
    ● Python 3.5
    Python 2.7
    JRE
    Node.js
    

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25. 25
    6.
    CONCLUSION
    

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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.
    

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27. THANKS
    yessica.bogado@pti.org.py
    walter.benitez@pti.org.py
    fabio.lopez@pti.org.py
    josef.spillner@zhaw.ch
    27
    

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