Make Your Application Serverless
This is a liveblog from the last day of the OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia. The title of the session is “Make Your Application Serverless,” and discusses Qinling, a project for serverless (Functions-as-a-Service, or FaaS) architectures/applications on OpenStack. The presenters for the session are Lingxian Kong and Feilong Wang from Catalyst Cloud.
Kong provides a brief background on himself and his co-presenter (Wang), and explains that Catalyst Cloud is an OpenStack-based public cloud based in New Zealand. Both presenters are active technical contributors to OpenStack projects.
Kong quickly transitions into the core content of the presentation, which focuses on serverless computing and Qinling, a project for implementing serverless architectures on OpenStack. Kong points out that serverless computing doesn’t mean there are no servers, only that the servers (typically VMs) are hidden from view. Functions-as-a-Service, or FaaS, is a better term that Kong prefers. He next provides an example of how a FaaS architecture may benefit applications, and contrasts solutions like AutoScaling Groups (or the equivalent in OpenStack) with FaaS.
Some key characteristics of serverless, as summarized by Kong:
- No need to think about servers
- Run your code, not the whole application
- Highly available and horizontally scalable
- Stateless/ephemeral
- Lightweight/single-purpose functions
- Event-driven Continue reading
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