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Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

openwhisk.apache.org

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Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#101

Post by intjk »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #64

Nowadays when someone claims to be "serverless", there can be two interpretations: 1. It's a server actually. It's just that the server serves up functions, without state. So a more correct terminology would be "stateless servers" 2. Truly P2P (Like blockchain), therefore there truly are no "servers". Used to think Amazon did a great job coming up with the jargon that's great for marketing, but lately as we see more…

I just interpret 'serverless' to mean 'an abstraction layer above the server'. The term is poorly named, but just like git commands you gotta go with what takes off. shrug unicode

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#102

Post by dfee »

Willson50 wrote: post #39
elvinyung wrote: post #36

Is there something to bridge the gap between serverful and serverless? Is there a good enough framework that lets me write Rails-like code and have it compile into a bunch of serverless jobs?

I don't know about rails, but there's a good Flask -> Lambda project called Zappa https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa

I found Zappa to be a bit peculiar - so I’ve been toying with `serverless`, which isn’t without its faults either.

However, with Zappa, you begin by downloading a bunch of wheels (pre-compiled python packages) as dependencies for your project - I guess this helps with the packaging / deployment problem, but it’s also bloat that you have to think about - and quite frankly a bizarre introduction to a framework that made me feel less than confident that it’s not duct tape app the way through.

With serverless, the wsgi plugin, and the python packaging plugin, you’re compiling wheels on a rocker container which means you’re requirements remain “yours”, you compile only and exactly what you need, and it looks a bit more like “normal Python”.

The downside of `serverless` is that you don’t get the “task” integration built in - so you pretty much need to wrap boto3 with your own api that mimics celery/rq/etc.

Also, as is the case with any solution I’ve found is that they’re peculiar to work with if you write your python code as a package - i.e. with a setup.py. You end up in a strange place with “-e .” not behaving well in a requirements.txt or a Pipfile that is used to package for Zappa.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#103

Post by shaunray »

deepnotderp wrote: post #89

Any way to compute in HPC clusters using FaaS?

Not where you can bring your own image as of yet. Although Thomasj above mentions you can do this in OpenWhisk.

The closest to scientific HPC I have used personally is pywren https://github.com/pywren/pywren

Which is attempting to add more cloud backends. It's out of Berkley University.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#104

Post by jameshart »

andybak wrote: post #19

So serverless is essentially a return to the PHP/CGI execution model... What's changed to turn a bad idea into a good idea again?

That analogy only really applies if you stick your serverless function behind an API gateway and invoke it through an HTTP request; honestly, AWS lambda behind an API gateway has always felt like a pretty poor way to build a microservice. Serverless functions seem to come into their own when they're connected to a reliable event triggering system - that looks to be the really interesting part of OpenWhisk, that it adds extensible triggers, much like the way AWS lambda can respond to events within the AWS ecosystem - but platform independent. In a high volume event-based world, small stateless processes become a very appealing idea again.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#106

Post by TuringNYC »

tw1010 wrote: post #81

To anyone who has a good feel for this space. Where do you think all this is heading in a 3-5 year time period? What is the medium-term vision like? I'm just curious.

I'm currently migrating to Kubernetes. Hard to tell where things go in 3yrs (the pace of change is so high, a year seems like forever)...BUT...a couple of things that drove me to the migration:

1 - Less stickiness to AWS since the serverless architecture would abstract away the provider and i could theoretically even grab the cheapest spot instances across providers (AWS, Google Cloud, SoftLayer, Azure) 2 - Lower compute bills (due to better usage and being able to more tightly pack stuff into nodes) 3 - Lower HR bills due to a lot of stuff just scaling up without effort rather than dozens of deployment/babysitting staff

Hard to know for sure, but these are the three things that drove me to Kubernetes.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#107

Post by manigandham »

tw1010 wrote: post #81

To anyone who has a good feel for this space. Where do you think all this is heading in a 3-5 year time period? What is the medium-term vision like? I'm just curious.

Consolidation. There are way too many frameworks right now and they offer nothing different, especially for something so commodity as packaging and running a single function. The major cloud vendors are also rapidly evolving with Azure Functions being the most integrated and useful with AWS second and GCP far behind.

The next few years will see 1-2 open-source frameworks along with all the cloud vendors getting to parity of running almost any language in response to almost any event source. Templated data pipelines and other processing should also become common and as easy to run as a docker container is today.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#108

Post by somberi »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #77
IgorPartola wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t seen option 2 things referred to as serverless. Their descriptions often involve the word blockchain from what I gather. Seeverless is a catchy name, and a better one perhaps would have been function oriented or function service or some such. But it really does mean swrverless in that (a) there isn’t one server and (b) there is zero configuration and maintenance of the server for you to perform.

> I haven’t seen option 2 things referred to as serverless. People use "blockchain" to describe it to other non-technical people, but they do need a way to describe their architecture. Among blockchain/crypto developers the word "blockchain" has become washed down too much that it really doesn't mean anything. So when they need to explain their architecture they do need a way to describe how their app doesn't have a…

Language construct trip - Less Sugar vs Sugarless.

On a separate track - Is it the sign of my age, that I am either concerned about developers not knowing the impact of their code on the hardware, or just whimsical and miss the days when one opened strace or kdb to see how efficiently the code executes? Does someone else feel this way?

One of the less desirable side effects of hardware becoming cheaper is that there are many places for a lousy programmer to hide.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#109

Post by _hyn3 »

CharlesW wrote: post #69
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #64

Nowadays when someone claims to be "serverless", there can be two interpretations: 1. It's a server actually. It's just that the server serves up functions, without state. So a more correct terminology would be "stateless servers" 2. Truly P2P (Like blockchain), therefore there truly are no "servers". Used to think Amazon did a great job coming up with the jargon that's great for marketing, but lately as we see more…

Like "cloud computing", the name "serverless" doesn't make much sense when used literally. It doesn't mean that there are no servers involved, just that there are none to be directly managed by the developer. P2P also doesn't mean "no servers", but that every node is as much server as client. Amazon popularized but didn't invent the term "serverless", which appears to have been first used in 2012.[1] [1] http://readw…

> It doesn't mean that there are no servers involved, just that there are none to be directly managed by the developer.

They already had stuff like that. S3. RDS. Elasticache. At least the cloud gives you the nebulous feeling of servers off in the ether somewhere.

But serverless is neither specific nor accurate. It doesn't work. It's nothing more than lazy marketing-speak.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#110

Post by stochastician »

shaunray wrote: post #103
deepnotderp wrote: post #89

Any way to compute in HPC clusters using FaaS?

Not where you can bring your own image as of yet. Although Thomasj above mentions you can do this in OpenWhisk. The closest to scientific HPC I have used personally is pywren https://github.com/pywren/pywren Which is attempting to add more cloud backends. It's out of Berkley University.

Hi! Pywren project lead here, we're working on more and more fun HPC-style projects! We're also interested in expanding to more and more backends, so please feel free to reach out if there's something you'd like to see.
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