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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

#111

Post by Proven »

_hyn3 wrote: post #109
CharlesW wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blockchain isn’t serverless either.

Invent a better name and let us know.

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

#112

Post by deepnotderp »

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.

I meant more like the opposite, where you can do parallel computing in a cluster by using a simple serverless FaaS paradigm. The idea is to remove the headache of manually setting up an MPI cluster, worrying about MPI communications, etc.

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

#113

Post by bri3d »

tinymollusk wrote: post #99
robertcope wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just telling my wife this morning that this "Serverless" business was just CGI reinvented. I don't get it.

I remember CGI; curious if you're able to elaborate how you see the analogy.

Pure CGI applications (before the mod_x / long-running workers strategy took over) are "stateless" / "function as a service" insofar as the application's internal state can only live for one request lifecycle. However, they generally ran with the external state (ex. local filesystem) preserved between requests, so the approach was still often a bit different than it is for modern FaaS applications, where state can only live off-server (ex. in a remote datastore or another service).

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

#114

Post by bri3d »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #76
CharlesW wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, all the projects that promote themselves as "serverless" are stateless functions… Any normal PHP app is just a collection of stateless functions, but that doesn't automatically make all PHP apps "serverless" apps. What makes something "serverless" is the FaaS[1] execution model. [1] https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

Most PHP apps are run by DBs. They are not stateless.

Most "FaaS" apps also access a remote datastore as well. The fundamental value of most web software applications revolves around state transformation in some way or another. FaaS just "cleans up" the application state insofar as it forces the state boundary to a comparatively slow edge and doesn't let you, for example, store things in in-memory shared datastores.

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

#115

Post by masukomi »

doppel wrote: post #63
cnj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is open source, so "someone" has to run it. This someone could be e.g. IBM or RedHat, it could also be someone like Adobe that wants to offer a FaaS integrated into their main product. It could also be your own company, e.g. you could have an infrastructure team that provides it for all other teams.

I find mentions of “deployments”, but unlike a platform like Kubernetes I can’t seem to find any mention of how to set up the “serverless servers” anywhere. And until then it’s just a really neat local CLI

yeah that was my take too. I have zero clue what's involved with the hosting of this and as it's an open source serverless product that's the most important bit. How easy or hard it is to use is irrelevant if i don't know _where_ to point things or what to do to make there be something to point things at.

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

#116

Post by masukomi »

nine_k wrote: post #48
masukomi wrote: post #38

Can someone explain to me WHERE the servers exist for this "serverless" platform? Is this code i run on lamda and lamda competitors? Is apache hosting it? Do i have to set up my own servers to run the code? All the intro docs and FAQs seem to assume that "serverless" is literally no servers, just magical cloud fairies or something. I get that it uses docker containers, but where can i / am i expected to run those?

Think of it as of some sort of a cluster. On a single machine, you can run processes ("invoke functions") locally. On a cluster, you can run a process, and it will start somewhere , on one of the less-loaded boxes. With "serverless", the cluster is the cloud (a datacenter). You do not have to maintain it, but you can specify the code to run, and it will run, as many copies of it simultaneously as needed (thousands or…

I appreciate the explanation, but you misunderstand me.

I get "serverless". I totally get lambda and some of the other open source clones of it. What i don't get about "Whisk" is if this is something that builds on top of existing serverless infrastructure that makes it better, or if it's it's own serverless infrastructure that you have to install on your own servers, or ... what. they're completely opaque about the actual server side infrastructure of this "serverless" platform.

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

#117

Post by bri3d »

doppel wrote: post #63
cnj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is open source, so "someone" has to run it. This someone could be e.g. IBM or RedHat, it could also be someone like Adobe that wants to offer a FaaS integrated into their main product. It could also be your own company, e.g. you could have an infrastructure team that provides it for all other teams.

I find mentions of “deployments”, but unlike a platform like Kubernetes I can’t seem to find any mention of how to set up the “serverless servers” anywhere. And until then it’s just a really neat local CLI

It looks like OpenWhisk right now deploys onto JVM application servers you provision yourself, using runc+Docker and Akka clustering under the hood to orchestrate everything. I think they have plans to target Kubernetes as well. FaaS/"serverless" (a terrible name) is just a layer over an orchestration/deployment system (like Kube) that spins up instances in response to triggers / events and handles routing and scheduling of the instances in a way that's supposed to be transparent to the end-user. https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/blob/master/do...

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

#119

Post by BatFastard »

TuringNYC wrote: post #106
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 com…

But I find some type of persistence of data usually figures into my serverless calls. And those tend to lock you into a vendor. Especially when you want to start analysing the data you have.

Even if you could separate them it would add latency. Now if it JUST compute... and I can see that as a possibility for some CV applications.

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

#120

Post by dannyw »

CharlesW wrote: post #74
losteric wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functions-as-a-service seems clearer to me

Me too! It also works nicely when thinking about the IaaS ⟷ PaaS ⟷ FaaS continuum of abstraction.

Eventually we'll get to LaaS, where instead of having to find, test, and integrate libraries, you type in some natural language like "send an email", and pop down a guaranteed-compatible-for-X-years, 100% uptime, edge-case-handled function that automatically bills per execution directly to your FaaS account, no registration or invoicing required.
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