Wietse Venema - Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run

by Wietse Venema

Copyright 2021 Wietse Venema. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-05709-3

[LSI]

I started my career as the dot-com bubble was inflating. Companies set their sights on becoming the future of [fill in the blank] by leveraging the internet to transform how people did everything from ordering pet food to buying books. Companies rushed to build data centers, filled them with servers, and began writing the software that would go on to eat the world, but not before the bubble burstmost companies filed for bankruptcy but left the servers and a mountain of technical debt behind.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble gave birth to a universe where every company was transformed into a tech company built on top of server farms and the weeds of infrastructure that grew around them. Soon the technical debt caught up to us and forced the industry to slow downway downand shift focus to keeping the lights on. Instead of building innovative applications for our customers, most of us spent our time patching servers and hiding behind firewalls, while our security teams chased vulnerabilities around.

What was supposed to propel us into the future became an anchor to the past.

While our server farms were slow to evolve, the cloud came to the rescue and offered a faster, cheaper, and better alternative. Instead of racking and stacking our own servers, we could rent theirs by the hour. While this was indeed an improvement, there was still something holding us backservers.

Automation tools came and went, each offering a better way of managing servers but still occupying too much of our time. In parallel, the application side of the industry was evolving much fasterand developers decided to take things into their own hands. They created containers, which introduced a universal way of packaging applications that no longer required servers to be configured correctly before applications could run on them.

Platforms like Docker and Kubernetes enabled the industry (particularly sysadmins) to run containerized applications across our existing servers, and eventually shed light on a set of cloud native patterns for doing so at scale. Kubernetes is considered a wildly successful project, but even it falls short of eliminating the challenges of running the servers underneath, which still need to be patched, configured, and maintained.

What you are holding in your hands is a peek into a serverless future, where the concept of a server has been buried under a set of cloud native abstractions and workflows dedicated to running and securing your containerized applications. This is a future where cloud providers bear the burden of managing servers, so you can focus on building innovative applications for your customers.