Highlights from my first JeffConf
Last month I partecipate at my first JeffConf in Milan, a community conference focused on Serverless and Function as a Service. For newbie, serverless doesn’t mean develop without server (impossible), but is a cloud oriented technology, focused on handle and run function and data in a resilient infrastructure and in a more smarty way than traditional infrastructure. In other words is a natural evolution of Platform As a Service and containers technology that automate the handling and processing respectively data and functions, “templating” the code and keeping the function/data usage as cost model.
During the conference many Italian and International speakers have shown products and use cases that come from vendors and projects. Let’s see in-depth…
AWS Lambda Functions by examples
Danilo Poccia is one of the most valued speaker at this conference; he’s a technical evangelist in AWS and during the presentation he showed some use case in AWS Lambda.
The example of MQTT chat is a demonstration of the powerful of AWS Lambda, a very low latency platform which is a great choice for cloud native applications. Here the example on Github: https://github.com/danilop/serverless-chat and an interesting article about it: https://medium.com/cloud-academy-inc/serverless-beyond-functions-cd81ee4c6b8d
As Final note, there is a way to develop your code in premise, before publish in AWS Lambda: using AWS SAM. Check here: https://aws.amazon.com/it/about-aws/whats-new/2017/08/introducing-aws-sam-local-a-cli-tool-to-test-aws-lambda-functions-locally/
Google Cloud Platform in the IoT ecosystem
Google Cloud Platform is another technology that aims to be in the frist three major Serverless platform of the world. The MQTT case by Andrea Ulisse was a real example of how to implement GCP serverless with Internet of Things purposes.
If you have a Google account, you could try GCP for free following this link: https://cloud.google.com
And in Microsoft’s house? In Azure Serverless there!
Microsoft during these last year is moving from on-premise operative system, to a more wide vision embracing hybrid and public cloud with Azure covering the whole stack:
- Infrastructure as a Service with the ability to move workload in-out cloud
- Platform as a Service, doing a very deep work integrating and offering a more and more wide degrees in terms of solutions from “big” applications like SAP to latest applications and software integrations (like IoT and data warehouse).
The presentation conducted by Jessica Tibaldi(Technical Evangelist in Azure) was focused on the use of Azure functions, the Function as a Service proposition that mix freedom of choice of the programming language and simplification during integration and deployment steps.
The coolest project of the year: OpenFaaS!
Let me write again, that one of the coolest open-source project of the year in the Serverless area is OpenFaaS. The author of this masterwork, Alex Ellis (a TechFieldDay delegate too), has built a community project which is awarded of the Bossie Awards 2017 as the best cloud computing software (the article).
What’s OpenFaas and why so cool? OpenFaaS is a serverless framework for Kubernetes and Docker Swarm that is able to deliver a true Function as a Service platform using Docker. In fact it’s possible to “package” any code written in Node.js, Python and C# or embed binaries like ffmpeg, deoply in on-premise workload (or directly in a cloud IaaS) and govern, scale and consume functions at requests.
If you want to give a try, check the Alex’s post here: https://blog.alexellis.io/first-faas-python-function/
Follow up
Serverless technology is becoming my upcoming focus for the next year, in the meantime I’ll post some example based on my experience on AWS Lambda and OpenFaaS. Stay tuned!
I leave this post with the following links:
https://serverless.zone/jeffconf-milan-2017-good-things-comes-in-threes-at-least-663df79763ee
And all videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp4wchugWzHvgeEnZuy3ExKd-Xkw9O6-N