Banu Parasuraman - Practical Spring Cloud Function: Developing Cloud-Native Functions for Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud Environments

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I entered the field of Information Technology (IT) 25 years ago, after spending time in sales and marketing. I was an average programmer and was never into hardcore programming. During my early life in IT, I worked as part of a team that built a baseball simulator for the Detroit Tigers. I helped build a video capture driver for that simulator using C++. Even though this was a great project with a lot of visibility, it was never my real passion to be a hard-core programmer.

I soon gravitated toward solution architecture. This seemed to perfectly tie my marketing skills to my technology skills. I began looking at solutions from a marketing lens. This approach formed the basis for writing this book. Because, what good is a technology if we do not know how to apply it in real life?

Functional programming was an emerging technology. Cloud providers such as AWS, Google, and Azure created serverless environments, with innovations such as Firecracker virtualization techniques, that allowed infrastructure to scale down to zero. This allowed customers to derive huge cost savings by not paying for resources that were not in use and subscribing to a pay-per-use model.

Initially, development of these functions that run on serverless environments were built on either NodeJS or Python. These functions were also vendor-specific. Spring.io developed the Spring Cloud Function framework, which allowed the functions to run in a cloud-agnostic environment. The focus was on the write once, deploy anywhere concept. This was a game changer in the cloud functions world.

Prior to writing this book, I was a staunch evangelist of Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. I promoted writing code that was portable. When Knative came into being in 2018 as a joint effort between IBM and Google, I was excited. Knative was designed as a serverless infrastructure on top of Kubernetes and made the serverless infrastructure portable. Combining the power and portability of Spring Cloud Function and Knative, you have a true portable system with zero scale-down capabilities.

This was something that I wanted to write and evangelize about. But I felt that writing about the technology and how it worked would not be that exciting. I wanted to write about how people could use this technology in the real world.

In this book, you will see how to program and deploy real-life examples using Spring Cloud Function. It starts with examples of writing code and deploying to AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Function, and Azure Function serverless environments. It then introduces you to the Knative on Kubernetes environment. Writing code and deploying is not enough. Automating the deployment is key in large-scale, distributed environments. You also see how to automate the CI/CD pipeline through examples.

This books also takes you into the world of data pipelines, AI/ML, and IoT. This book finishes up with real-world examples in oil and gas (IoT), manufacturing (IoT), and conversational AI (retail). This book touches on AWS, the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, IBM Cloud, and VMware Tanzu.

The code for these projects is provided on GitHub at https://github.com/banup-kubeforce . It is also available at github.com/apress/practical-spring-cloud-function . This allows you to get up to speed on the technologies. So, after completing this book, you will have hands-on experience with AI/ML, IoT, data pipelines, CI/CD, and of course Spring Cloud Function.

I hope you enjoy reading and coding this book.

It has been a great privilege to write this book and help you understand real-world implementations of Spring Cloud Function. Thank you for reading it.

After my presentation at SpringOne 2020, I received a message on LinkedIn from Steve Anglin at Apress. Steve asked me if I would be willing to write a book about Spring Cloud Function. I was a bit hesitant at first, given that I was occupied with many client engagements, which were taking up most of my work hours. I was worried that I would not do the subject justice, due to my preoccupation with my clients. But after a long contemplation and a heartfelt discussion with my family, I decided to take it on.

I want to thank Steve Anglin, Associate Editorial Director, for reaching out to me and providing me this opportunity to write a book on Spring Cloud Function.

Mark Powers, the Editorial Operations Manager, was instrumental in helping me bring this book to close. With his incessant prodding and nudging, he helped me reached the finish line. Thanks, Mark.

Manuel Jordan, the technical reviewer, was immensely helpful. His comments kept me honest and prevented me from cutting corners. He helped improve the quality of the solutions that I present in this book. Thanks, Manuel.

I also want to thank Nirmal Selvaraj and others at Apress, who worked to bring this book to fruition.

This book would not be possible without the help of my wife Vijaya and daughters Pooja and Deepika, who provided the much-needed emotional support through this journey.