Building and Running an Enterprise-grade Serverless Platform on Kubernetes

Serverless platforms provide functions as a service, and have become a hot topic largely because they allow developers to focus on core business logic, leaving packaging, deployment, monitoring, event …

Serverless platforms provide functions as a service, and have become a hot topic largely because they allow developers to focus on core business logic, leaving packaging, deployment, monitoring, event propagation, scaling and load balancing to the infrastructure. The serverless billing model is simple - pay-per-invocation - which can being significant benefits for many event-driven applications. Huawei launched its FunctionStage serverless platform, which is built on Kubernetes, in 2017. In this talk we will explain in detail the design and implementation of FunctionStage. This involved both fairly straightforward function packaging, scheduling, auto-scaling, event triggering and load balancing, as well as some significantly more interesting challenges related to container re-use, on-the-fly micro service provisioning, reliable operation and much more. We will demonstrate the use of our system to solve some complex real-world problems in Huawei Public Cloud.