One of the things I love about serverless is that I never have to be bothered with managing servers, it’s just using a service like Lambda, Cloud Run, etc and my code is running. If I want to use a database I can rely on services like DynamoDB or CosmosDB. While I think that is absolutely great, it feels like serverless is only for stateless processes. I think serverless needs a bold and stateful vision so that we can build any type of application (stateful and stateless) without ever managing servers.
In the session I went over why serverless is important to our industry, why server admins (which I then rephrased to SREs) are so important to our serverless success, and why stateless isn’t the answer for everything. Technology wise I’ll be “all over the map” talking about things like Knative and the VMware Event Broker Appliance, AWS Lambda, Akka Serverless
Leon Stigter, senior product manager for serverless at Lightbend, elaborated on the problem, telling SiliconANGLE that developers generally consider serverless to be a “stateless solution,” which means that every time an application needs to do something, it must connect to a database first. For single services that isn’t so difficult, he said, but when it happens at bigger scales, tasks such as connection pooling can be very difficult, causing lots of headaches.
As Auth0 says on their website “Identity is the front door of every user interaction”. As you’re building our new serverless applications, that becomes even more important as you have multiple apps that you need to secure. In this blog post I’ll walk you through how that can work in Akka Serverless.
CI/CD is one of those quintessential mindset shifts that helps developers automate away the toil of deploying apps. Especially in the realm of serverless, where the whole idea is to focus on the things that matter and let the undifferentiated heavy lifting be handled by others, automating as much as possible is paramount. It helps developers focus on what matters, code, and it helps business focus on what matters, getting quality software to market faster. So how does that work in Akka Serverless?
As developers, we all want to be more productive. Serverless helps you do just that, by letting you focus on the business logic while shifting operations somewhere else. As more companies discover this emerging technology, we also discover drawbacks like state management. In this session, I focused on what serverless is, how it helps developers, what potential drawbacks exist, and how we can add state management into serverless.
As developers, we all want to be more productive. Knative, a Kubernetes based platform to deploy and manage modern serverless works, helps to do just that. The idea behind Knative is to abstract away the complexity of building apps on top of Kubernetes as much as possible and Tekton is a powerful and flexible open-source CI/CD tool. How can you bring those two together on your local machine to try a few things out or even develop your apps? During this talk, we looked at setting up a KinD cluster, bootstrapping Knative and Tekton, and deploying an app!
Is the emergence of new application platforms relevant to your enterprise? How will you benefit from scale-to-zero scenarios? What do “events” mean? In this session, I walked through these new patterns and present concrete, simple use cases and examples for each of them. We will also discuss the properties of platforms designed to support such patterns, as well as interesting and relevant innovations in the open-source community and the VMware ecosystem and portfolio.
For developers, Knative abstracts away complexity and enables them to focus on delivering value to their business. Can we make setting up a Kubernetes cluster and starting with Knative on your local machine even more straight forward than it is today? In this session, I focused on setting up a lightweight environment to help you build event-driven apps faster!
With everything going on in DevOps, I think we can safely say that building pipelines is the way to deploy your applications to production. But knowing what you deploy to production and whether it is actually okay needs more data, like security checks, performance checks, and budget checks. We’ve come up with a process for that, which we call Continuous Verification “A process of querying external systems and using information from the response to make decisions to improve the development and deployment process.” In this session, we’ll look at extending an existing CI/CD pipeline with checks for security, performance, and cost to make a decision on whether we want to deploy our app or not.
