The document discusses the Fn Project, an open-source serverless computing platform. It provides lessons learned from using serverless technologies, including issues with execution times, timeouts, and vendor lock-in. The Fn Project aims to address these issues by providing a platform that can be deployed anywhere and uses containers as primitives. It has components like the Fn CLI and Fn Server and supports building scalable and reliable functions.

1. The Fn Project
Lessons learnt with Serverless
Maximilian Jerg
Open Source Serverless Computing

2. Agenda
● Serverless
● Lessons learnt
● Fn project
● Live Demo

3. Serverless

4. What is Serverless?
● Serverless focuses on applications not infrastructure
● Managed service of infrastructure and its operations including
provisioning, scaling, dynamic allocation of resources,
patching, etc.
● Server management and capacity planning decisions are
completely hidden
● Pricing is based on the resources consumed

5. Functions-as-a-Service
● Functions are small bits of code that do one thing well and are
easy to understand and maintain
● Stateless since there is typically no shared-memory
In mathematics, a function is a relation between a set
of inputs and a set of permissible outputs with the
property that each input is related to exactly one output.
Function (mathematics) - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)

6. Why Serverless?
● Easier: Just think about your code, not infrastructure
● Powerful: Transparent and limitless scaling
● Faster: Deploy faster, iterate faster, innovate faster
● Reliability: Increase reliability of critical apps using modern
architectures
● Productivity: Very good for small developer teams
● Cheaper: Only pay for what you use to the 100ms (never idle)

7. Lessons learnt…

8. Our use case
● Part of backend is a REST-based service
● Highly variable workloads
○ Usually 1-150 of requests a day
○ But very high traffic during a few days every year
● Data aggregation + transformation
 Decision for Node + Serverless

9. Problems
● Execution time
○ Much, much slower
○ Cold starts
○ Allocation of RAM
○ Processing power?
● Timeouts
● Lock-in
○ Strongly tied into the vendor implementation
○ Vendor standard and not industry standard

10. Solution
● Serverless.com
○ CLI
○ Supports all major FaaS vendors and Fn
● OpenFaaS and Fnproject
● CloudEvents / Event Gateway

11. Fnproject

12. Fn Project
● Open-source serverless compute platform
● Can be deployed to any cloud and on-premise
● Simple, elegant, and extensible by design
● Containers are primitives
● Active w/ 2500+ commits across 60+ contributors
● Independently governed with plans for foundation
● Strong enterprise focus (security, scalability, observability, etc.)

13. Components
FDK’sFn Server Fn Flow

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

15. fn deploy details
1. Builds container (multi-stage) + bumps version
2. Pushes container to registry
3. Creates/updates 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

16. Architecture

17. Demo

18. What about Serverless?
Traditional architecture Virtualized Architecture FaaS on Demand

19. 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!

20. Thank you!
1. Star the project: github.com/fnproject/fn
2. Join the conversation: slack.fnproject.io
3. Learn more: fnproject.io
4. We’re hiring engineers and evangelists:
chad.arimura@oracle.com
Maximilian Jerg
uniPortal / Oracle
mx.jerg@gmail.com
Get Involved

21. The Fn Project
FDK’sFn Server Fn Flow