Serverless is Interesting But FaaS is Not Enough

Serverless is interesting because it emphasizes automation of infrastructure, but current Function-as-a-Service implementations are not suited for building general purpose apps. Whats missing is a wa …

Serverless is interesting because it emphasizes automation of infrastructure, but current Function-as-a-Service implementations are not suited for building general purpose apps. What’s missing is a way to model and manage stateful services. Can we make stateful apps run as if they were stateless? We’ll investigate the inherent challenges with serving stateful services from a scaling perspective while preserving responsiveness by designing for resilience and elasticity, using Akka—an OSS library for distributed stateful apps—as a concrete example. We’ll discuss design principles needed to address problems around data consistency, system integrity, and data locality, why they are key to maintain overall system behavior under failure and load and discuss pitfalls and requirements needed to understand when operating the infrastructure fabric—f.e. Knative—which orchestrates the services.