The document discusses the Fn Project, an open source serverless computing platform. It is cloud agnostic and aims to democratize serverless computing. Key points include that Fn uses containers as functions, supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, and can run on a user's own infrastructure or clouds. It also has features for operators like load balancing, metrics, and optimization for Kubernetes.

1. The Fn Project
Jesse Butler
Cloud Native Developer Advocate
Oracle Cloud Native Labs
cloudnative.oracle.com
Democratizing Serverless:
The Open Source, Cloud Agnostic Functions Platform

2. Safe Harbor
The following is intended to outline our general product
direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and
may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a
commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality,
and should not be relied upon in making purchasing
decisions. The development, release, and timing of any
features or functionality described for Oracle’s products
remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.

3. About Me
● Oracle via Sun Microsystems
● drivers -> deployment -> containers
● Responsible for Docker on Solaris, later on Oracle Linux
● Now a Cloud Native Advocate within the OCI organization

4. Setting the Stage
● Serverless is an abstraction of infrastructure and its operations
including host provisioning, software maintenance, scaling, etc.
● FaaS Functions as a Service, the compute component in a
serverless architecture
● Functions are small bits of code that do one thing well and are
easy to understand and maintain.
● Fn is an Open Source Serverless Compute Platform

5. Containers as Functions
Function is a container with a
set of known traits:
● Invoked
● Ephemeral
● Stateless
● Single intent
● Self-contained

6. Why Serverless?
● Powerful: Transparent and limitless scaling
● Faster: Deploy faster, iterate faster, innovate faster
● Simpler: Fix business problems, not infrastructure problems
● Frictionless: Focus on innovation and iteration == speed
For Developers

7. Why Serverless?
● Agile: Smaller teams, less dependencies
● Reliable: This becomes the platform’s responsibility
● Extensible: Use best-in-class and familiar components
● Efficient: Pay for execution only by 100ms blocks, reduce op-ex
For Operators

8. What about Microservices?

9. About the Fn Project
● Open Source Serverless Compute Platform
● Cloud-agnostic, or on your own metal
● Simple, elegant and extensible by design
● Containers are primitives, with Docker
● Native CloudEvents support
● Active w/ 3500+ commits across 70+ contributors
● Strong enterprise focus (security, scalability, observability):
major bank, telco and retail POC’s underway

10. For Developers

11. An Fn Function
● Ideally small bit of code, wrapped in a container image
● Gets input via STDIN and environment
● Produces output to STDOUT
● Logs to STDERR
The Fn server handles everything else, including the API gateway,
piping IO around, storing logs, etc

12. Function Development Kits (FDKs)
● Used to help with parsing input and writing output
● Familiar syntax for Lambda developers
● Simplifies writing hot functions (use ‘json’ format and an FDK)
● Simply write a `handler` function that adheres to the FDK’s
interface and it will parse STDIN and provide the input data to
your function and deal with writing the proper output format.

13. Fn CLI
● fn init --runtime go | python | java | ..
● fn run
● fn test
● fn deploy --app myapp
● fn call myapp myfunc
→ http://localhost:8080/r/myapp/myfunc

14. fn deploy details
1. Build container (multi-stage) + bumps version
2. Push container to registry (unless --local)
3. Create or update function route (servers lazy load images)
MyFunc:0.0.2
MyFunc:0.0.2 MyFunc:0.0.2
Your code
Fn Service
myfunc →
/r/myapp/myfunc:0.0.2
1 2 3

15. Fn UI

16. For Operators

17. Architecture

18. Fn LB
● Simple, fast load balancer that routes functions to certain
nodes consistently for hot function efficiency
● Scales each function independently, based on traffic to any
particular route
● Can be used to scale Fn servers and infrastructure, has a view
of global state of all Fn servers

19. Fn Server
● Handles CRUD operations for setting up routes and functions
● Executes sync functions, returning responses to clients
● Queues async function calls
● Executes async functions when capacity is available
● Written in Go, easy to extend via plugin module system

20. Supporting Services
● DB, MQ, blob store are all pluggable modules
○ DB: MySQL, sqlite3, Postgres
○ Queue: Redis, Kafka
○ Registry: Any Docker v2-compliant registry endpoint
● Metrics & Monitoring
○ OpenTracing API for metrics
○ Prometheus support, pluggable backends
○ Logging via syslog

21. Open Tracing and Prometheus

22. Kubernetes
● Fn is scheduler agnostic, but lots of optimization/management
work underway to optimize on Kubernetes
● Thinking about deeper Kubernetes integrations including
CRD’s to model functions
● Helm chart available at https://github.com/fnproject/fn-helm

23. Why not just k8s All The Things?
1. Speed
a. Pod launch time is too unpredictable for sync requests
b. Coordinating resource allocation is slow
c. We can preload + hot pod like we do with current scheduling but…
2. Scale
a. We run out of addressable network space quickly
b. Functions easily scale to the hundreds of thousands / millions

24. Fn Flow

25. Fn Flow
● Build long-running, reliable, scalable functions with rich sets of
language-specific primitives including fork-join, chaining, delays
and error handling
● Supports complex parallel processes that are readable and
testable (including unit tests) with standard programming tools
● Java support using CompletableFuture API from Java 8 with
JS, Python, Go language support on the way!

26. Plate Detect
Function
Draw
Function
Slack
Function
Twitter
Function
Scraper

27. Scraper
Plate Detect
Function
Draw
Function
Slack
Function
Twitter
Function
FlowFuture.invoke()
thenCompose()
thenCompose()
allOf()
whenComplete()

28. Scraper
Plate Detect
Function
Draw
Function
Slack
Function
Twitter
Function
FlowFuture.invoke()
thenCompose()
thenCompose()
allOf()
whenComplete()
Flow Function

29. 1. Star the project: github.com/fnproject/fn
2. Join the conversation: slack.fnproject.io
3. Learn more about Fn: fnproject.io
4. Cloud Native Labs: cloudnative.oracle.com
Jesse Butler
Cloud Native Developer Advocate
Oracle Cloud Native Labs
@jlb13
Thank you!