Chapter 19. Serverless Computing

Question 1

What is serverless computing?

Answer 1

• method of running applications without concers about the provisioning of computer servers or any compute resources

Question 2

How does serverless computing work?

Answer 2

• we write applications/functions that focus and master one particular task
• upload that application on the cloud provider, which gets invoked via different events (webhooks, http requests, …)

Question 3

What are use-cases of serverless computing?

Answer 3

• Internet of things
• ChatBots

Question 4

What are features and benefits of serverless computing?

Answer 4

• No server management - all handled by the cloud provider
• cost-effective
• flexible scaling - automatically on-demand
• automated high availability and fault tolerance

Question 5

What are projects that are using containers to execute serverless applications?

Answer 5

• Azure Container Instances
• AWS Fargate
• Fission (open source, Function as a Service framework on Kubernetes)
• FN project (open source)
• Virtual Kubelet

Question 6

What is Knative?

Answer 6

• open source platform based on kubernetes
• allows deployment and management of serverless applications

Question 7

What are Knative key features?

Answer 7

• Servig - runs applications in containers on Kubernetes. Automates networking, ingress, scaling, application deployment rollout and revisions, logging and monitoring
• Eventing - allows applications to publish and subscribe to event streams such as Kafka or Google Cloud Pub/Sub