Sciabarrà - Learning Apache OpenWhisk

by Michele Sciabarr

Copyright 2019 Michele Sciabarr. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-04616-5

[LSI]

Amazon Web Services changed the cloud computing landscape in November of 2014 when it launched a new service called Lambda. It offered developers the intriguing possibility of processing thousands of events concurrently, simply by registering functions as event handlers. With Lambda, functions execute on-demand and scale instantly and costs are proportional to actual resource utilization. This new model of computing was dubbed serverless because it let developers eschew all aspects of server-side development and operationsincluding infrastructure management, resource provisioning, and scaling.

Amazon showed that in the era of managed infrastructure and services, cloud providers can free developers from low-level operational burdens and let them focus on what matters most: delivering real business value to their organizations. Serverless computing is the foundation of a cloud-native transformation that is ongoing in the industry. It is the way cloud applications are being built and will largely be built in the future. There are now more than a trillion functions processed every month on Amazon alone for a wide variety of applications from IoT, web applications, machine learning, and high-performance computing.

At IBM Research, my group took notice of the Lambda announcement, and we quickly realized the value of the serverless promise. So in February 2015, we set out to build a serverless platform for the IBM Cloud. The project was code-named Whisk, as in to move nimbly and quickly. It was later branded OpenWhisk when we open-sourced the code to GitHub, nearly a year to the day from our first commit. Today, the project is part of the Apache Software Foundation Incubator and its the premiere open-source alternative to Amazons Lambda. Apache OpenWhisk is ready for Enterprise workloads and offers a powerful programming model for building entire serverless applications. It powers serverless product offerings from IBM and Adobe, and its used in private deployments in some of Asias largest mobile and internet providers. The Apache OpenWhisk community consists of more than 215 contributors from around the world, and is among the top 30 Apache Foundation projects ranked by their GitHub stars. Many of the top OpenWhisk contributors are now also shaping the future of other emerging serverless platforms such as Googles Knative project, which aims to bring a serverless experience to the increasingly popular Kubernetes platform.

In this book, Michele Sciabarr delivers a thorough exposition of Apache OpenWhisk tailored to the needs of developers and operators. For developers eager to adopt a serverless methodology, this book explains the emerging computational patterns and current limitations. It also illustrates several examples of applying the technology to solve real-world challenges. For operators who want to deliver a serverless experience for their organizations, Michele carefully reveals the OpenWhisk architecture, and provides a go-to guide for deployment and operations, particularly for a Kubernetes-based deployment.

Michele draws on his own contributions to the Apache OpenWhisk project in writing this book. His work has dramatically improved the performance of serverless functions developed in Go, PHP, Python, Swift, and more. His insightful and practical approach is well-suited to the developer who wants get up to speed quickly in harnessing the power of serverless computing.

For those of us at the frontier of the serverless journey, there is no doubt that we are witnessing the dawn of a new Cloud Computer, with functions at the cornerstone of a new instruction set architecture. This model of computing is powerful and disruptive, and yet much work remains to be done. History has shown that as new computer abstractions emerge, innovation follows.

Rodric Rabbah

CTO and Cofounder Nimbella Corporation

April, 2019