Serverless is currently the talk of the town and is enjoying increasing popularity. What does serverless actually mean, what are its characteristics and when do you prefer the use of serverless technologies to a container-based solution? With the Fn project, Oracle now has a serverless open source platform that can run in the cloud, in its own data center or on a developer's local computer. This distinguishes the solution from other serverless platforms on the market. The Fn project is developed by the same team that previously implemented IronFunctions. The framework is based on Docker and currently does not require a managed runtime environment. But is it still serverless? The session explains basic serverless concepts, benefits and deployment scenarios of the platform-independent Fn Serverless framework.

1. © OPITZ CONSULTING 2018
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© OPITZ CONSULTING 2018
Sven Bernhardt, Danilo Schmiedel
Serverless architectures
with Fn Project

2. © OPITZ CONSULTING 2018 Serverless architectures with Fn Project Seite 2
OPITZ CONSULTING - A success story since 1990
¢ Our Mission: Help organizations to leverage the possibilities of
digitalization to be different, better and faster than their competitors
¢ Owner-led company with
¢ 450+ consultants
¢ 11 locations in Germany and Poland
Danilo Schmiedel
¢
¢ Senior Managing Consultant
¢ Business Development and Innovation
About us
Sven Bernhardt
¢ Senior Solution Architect
¢ Technical Lead for API Management

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Agenda
1
2
3
5
Serverless, FaaS, BaaS
Fn Project
Fn Flow
Summary
Serverless architectures with Fn Project
4 Use Cases and Scenarios

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Serverless, FaaS and BaaS
1
Serverless architectures with Fn Project

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Serverless standard picture
¢ Serverless != No Server => Just means someone else‘s computer
https://www.flickr.com/photos/91707070@N03/8331732961
Source: https://bit.ly/2zeliT9
Serverless = Exit door from traditional IT operations,
since no Servers are needed anymore?
Clearly no! Serverless just mean that your code is
running on someone elses computer somewhere,
somehow and you don‘t have to care about it.

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Promises of Serverless
¢ Easier: Just think about your code, not infrastructure
¢ Powerful: Transparent and limitless scaling
¢ Faster: Deploy faster, iterate faster, innovate faster
¢ Cheaper: Only pay for what you use (never idle)
Source: https://bit.ly/2QSP0nd

7. © OPITZ CONSULTING 2018 Serverless architectures with Fn Project
Serverless Manifesto by Potes & Nair (AWS)
¢ Functions are the unit of deployment and scaling
¢ No machines, VMs, or containers visible in the programming model
¢ Permanent storage lives elsewhere
¢ Scales per request: Users cannot over- or under-provision capacity
¢ Never pay for idle (no cold servers/containers or their costs)
¢ Implicitly fault-tolerant because functions can run anywhere
¢ BYOC — Bring Your Own Code
¢ Metrics and logging are a universal right
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Characteristics of a Function
¢ Granular compute unit in Serverless
¢ Short-lived
¢ Ephemeral
¢ Stateless
¢ Scalable
¢ Event-Driven
¢ Single Purpose
¢ Self-contained
¢ Function has one output for a specific input Function f
Input x
Output f(x)

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Serverless, FaaS and BaaS
¢ Serverless: Abstraction of infrastructure and its operations including
provisioning, scaling, patching, etc.
¢ Serverless applications significantly depend on third-party services
¢ A Serverless Computing Platform may provide one or both of:
¢ Functions-as-a-Service:
¢ Compute component in a serverless platform
¢ Custom Code that runs in ephemeral containers
¢ Backend-as-a-Service:
¢ Third-party API-based services
¢ Replaces core subsets of functionality in an application

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Evolution of application architectures
Monolithic
architectures
µService
architectures
Serverless
architectures
f(a1) f(a2)
f(a3) f(a4) f(b4)f(b3)
f(b2)f(b1)
f(c3) f(c4)
f(c2)f(c1) f(d1) f(d2)
f(d3) f(d4)
Ø Single application
Ø Mixed data from different
business context
Ø Mixed business logic
Ø Application consists of
different µService
Ø Business logic and data
belong to a bounded
business context
Ø Application consists of
multiple functions
Ø Fine-granular logic for a
specific step, data resides
externally

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Serverless: Focus on implementing business logic

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Serverless and Cloud-Native technologies
Source: https://bit.ly/2S5tgoH

13. © OPITZ CONSULTING 2018 Serverless architectures with Fn Project Seite 13Source: https://bit.ly/2CJaco4

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Fn Project
2
Serverless architectures with Fn Project

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About Fn Project
¢ Open-source Functions-as-a-Service compute platform (Apache 2.0
licence)
¢ Easy to use for developers
¢ Easy to manage for operators
¢ Active large core team, 3500+ commits, 75+ contributors
¢ Members on the CNCF serverless working group
¢ Native CloudEvents support (https://cloudevents.io/)
¢ Specification for describing event data in a common way
¢ Event declaration and delivery across services and platforms

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Fn Project architecture
¢ Written in Go
¢ Container-based: Leverages Docker
¢ Run anywhere:
¢ Cloud
¢ On-Premise Datacenter
¢ Local development environment

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Fn Project runtime
¢ Fn is runtime-agnostic
¢ Can be targeted to run on Kubernetes (K8s)
¢ K8s optimizations are WIP
¢ Plans for deeper K8s integration using CRDs
¢ Helm chart available to install to K8s (https://bit.ly/2S1bvXm)
¢ Runtime monitoring:
¢ Prometheus support for metrics collection
¢ Metrics visualization with Grafana

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Function in Fn
¢ Small chunk of code wrapped into a container image
¢ Developers just need to care about business logic
¢ Function is wrapped in a Container Image
¢ Function is defined and deployed within an app
¢ Functions are written in code
Function f
STDIN
(Input)
STDOUT
(Output)
STDERR
(Logs)

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Wait! Functions and Containers... What the heck?
¢ Serverless Manifesto says: „No machines, VMs, or containers visible in the
programming model“ à So Fn Project is not really Serverless, right?
¢ Fn is FaaS, the underlying platform needs to ensure that
¢ Developer does not need to care about the containers and the technical stuff belonging to
it (Build, Deploy, Run....)
¢ Users does not need to pay for idle containers
¢ Function is capable to scale automatically and infinitetly
¢ Advantage of the container-based approach is increased iteroperability
(no vendor lock-in)
¢ Other Container-based FaaS Frameworks: Kubeless, Fission

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Function development
¢ Multi language support through Function Developer Kit (FDK)
¢ FDKs comprise of different building blocks, like
¢ Language-specific Fn libraries
¢ Build-Time Docker images
¢ Minimal runtime Docker images
¢ Fn CLI is used to manage and create Functions

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Serverless Manifesto and Fn Project
¢ Functions are the unit of deployment and scaling ✓
¢ No machines, VMs, or containers visible in the programming model ✓
¢ Permanent storage lives elsewhere ✓
¢ Scales per request: Users cannot over- or under-provision capacity
¢ Never pay for idle (no cold servers/containers or their costs)
¢ Implicitly fault-tolerant because functions can run anywhere
¢ BYOC — Bring Your Own Code ✓
¢ Metrics and logging are a universal right ✓
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Demo - Function development
Serverless architectures with Fn Project

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Fn Flow
3
Serverless architectures with Fn Project

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Building advanced functions with Fn Flow
¢ Build reliable and scalable FaaS applications with functions
¢ Flow functions are written purely in code
¢ Build distributed applications
¢ Provides rich concurrency primitives including fork-join, chaining,
delays and error handling
¢ Testable using standard programming tools and mechanisms (e.g.
Unit tests)

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Fn Flow compared to workflow solutions
¢ No context-switching, beause everything is code
¢ Leverage full power of the used programming language
¢ More powerful errorhandling capabilities
¢ Easy, consistent and comprehensible data and context handling
¢ Highly functional approach for implementing the flow
¢ Might be hard to read and understand for non-technicians

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Example Use Case Fn Flow: Saga
¢ Microservice Pattern: Saga defined
by Chris Richardson
¢ Specifically: Orchestration-based
Saga
Source: https://microservices.io/patterns/data/saga.html

27. © OPITZ CONSULTING 2018 Serverless architectures with Fn Project Seite 27Source: https://github.com/fnproject/tutorials/blob/master/FlowSaga/images/1-travel-app.png

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Use Cases and Scenarios
4
Serverless architectures with Fn Project

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10 common use cases for Serverless platforms

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Serverless Best Practices
1. Each function should do only one thing
2. Functions don‘t call other functions
3. Use as few libraries in your functions as possible
4. Avoid using connection based services (use services rather than
connections)
5. One function per route (if using HTTP)
6. Learn to use messages and queues
7. Data flows, not data lakes
8. Just coding for scale is a mistake, you have to consider how it scales
(c) Paul Johnsten, ServerlessDays CoFounder

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Severless & Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP)
¢ EIPs try to address integration problems based on
messaging
¢ In EIPs there are definitions for basic components that
are used to implement integrations, like
¢ Channels
¢ Splitter
¢ Aggregator
¢ Router …
Source: https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messaging/Filter.html

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Example: EIP Message Translator
System A System B
X
f(x) getData f(x) sendDataf(x) transformData
https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messaging/MessageTranslator.html

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Example: EIP Message Splitter and Router
System A
System C
System B
f(x) getData f(x) splitData f(x) routeDataToC
f(x) routeDataToB

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When is FaaS adequate for integration?
¢ Typical use cases:
¢ Batch processing, which takes place on regular schedules
¢ Event processing
¢ Considerations to make:
¢ Number of invocations
¢ Keep runtime short
¢ Serverless Platforms will terminate long-running Functions
¢ Don‘t block HW resources for too long

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Summary
5
Serverless architectures with Fn Project

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Summary
¢ Functions are first class citizens
¢ Fn Project is a
¢ Framework for implementing FaaS-style applications
¢ But is not a Serverless framework (no Serverless runtime available)
¢ FaaS is good for the right use cases, but it‘s no silver bullet!
¢ Strength of Fn Project: No vendor lock-in!
¢ FaaS provides new opportunities for implementing applications
¢ Event-based, scalable and ephemeral
¢ Stateless
¢ Infinitely scalable (in theory)

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With great power, comes great responsibility...
¢ Rethink the traditional application architectures!
Client
API Gateway
IDM /
Authentication
PlaceOrder
SearchProducts
POST /api/v1/orders
GET /api/v1/products
CreateInvoiceCheckoutWarehouse
Event Hub
OrderCreated
OrderCreatedOrderCreated

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Links and Resources
¢ Fn Project: http://fnproject.io
¢ Github Fn Project: https://github.com/fnproject
¢ CNCF Whitepaper Serverless: https://bit.ly/2S5tgoH
¢ CloudEvents: https://cloudevents.io/
¢ Enterprise Integration Patterns:
https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com
¢ Microservices Patterns: https://microservices.io

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Q & A

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Contact us!
Danilo Schmiedel
Senior Managing Consultant Solutions | Oracle ACE Director
OPITZ CONSULTING Deutschland GmbH
Tempelhofer Weg 64, 12347 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49 173 7279001
Mail: danilo.schmiedel@opitz-consulting.com
@dschmied
http://inside-bpm-and-soa.blogspot.com
Sven Bernhardt
Senior Solution Architect | Oracle ACE
OPITZ CONSULTING Deutschland GmbH
Kirchstrasse 6, 51647 Gummersbach, Germany
Phone: +49 172 2193529
Mail: sven.bernhardt@opitz-consulting.com
@sbernhardt
https://svenbernhardt.wordpress.com
Serverless architectures with Fn Project