1.
The path to a
Serverless-native era with
Kubernetes

2.
Who i am
Paolo Mainardi
@paolomainardi
➔
➔ CTO of Sparkfabrik
➔ CKA(D) certified, GCP Cloud Architect
➔ We are hiring!

3.
What is Serverless
The session
● What is the hype
● Serverless concepts (FaaS, BaaS, *aaS)
● Serverless on Kubernetes

4.
The hype

5.
The hype

6.
The hype

7.
WHAT IS SERVERLESS ?

8.
“Serverless computing refers to the concept of building and
running applications that do not require server management”
CNCF Serverless Whitepaper v1.0 - https://github.com/cncf/wg-serverless/tree/master/whitepapers/serverless-overview

9.
SERVERLESS IS ALL
ABOUT THE
DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

10.
1. Cost and resource efficient — scale down to zero
2. Pay as you go — scale up on demand
3. Automation — of scale, failure handling, and recovery
4. Supporting the full dev cycle — dev, build, CI, prod
SERVERLESS IS ALL ABOUT THE DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE
Functions

11.
What is Serverless
How we think about Serverless
FUNCTIONS EVENTS
A piece of code (usually written in
Javascript ) to perform a specific task.
A response to something that
happens in the cloud that triggers my
functions.
and

12.
Functions
Use case #1
Credits: https://github.com/mhausenblas/2018-state-of-faas-on-kube
Translate a text file from
Italian to English*.
* only pay what you use

13.
Functions
Use case #2
Credits: https://github.com/mhausenblas/2018-state-of-faas-on-kube
Process real-time data
and push notifications
to clients*
* only pay what you use

14.
What is Serverless
Credits: https://www.gocd.org/2017/06/26/serverless-architecture-continuous-delivery/
Key properties of FaaS:
● Independent, server-side, logical functions
● Stateless, ephemeral
● Event-triggered
● Scalable from 0 to N
● Short-lived processes
● Fully managed by a third party (AWS Lambda, GCP Functions,
Azure Functions, Alibaba Cloud Function Compute…)

15.
SERVERLESS ≠ FAAS

16.
BAAS - Backend as a service
Credits: https://blog.neap.co/the-serverless-series-what-is-serverless-d651fbacf3f4

17.
Credits: https://blog.neap.co/the-serverless-series-what-is-serverless-d651fbacf3f4
SERVERLESS
IS ALL ABOUT THE
BILLING MODEL

18.
“A Serverless solution is one that costs you nothing
to run if nobody is using it (excluding data storage)”
“A simple definition of serverless,Paul Johnston, 2017”

19.
What is Serverless
What is Serverless ?

20.
What is Serverless
Serverless on public cloud
● Limited language runtimes supported (Lambda, GCP, Azure etc..)
● Vendor-proprietary mechanisms to package and deploy the functions

21.
What is Serverless
Serverless on public cloud
● Proprietary Event format
● Locked-in language runtime
● Limited support to run or debug functions locally

22.
LOCK-IN

23.
Functions
Use case #3
Convert CSV files to
JSON
{JSON}

24.
Functions
Use case #3
Convert CSV files to
JSON coming from
multiple cloud providers
{JSON}

25.
Event format
Use case #3 - Event format

26.
Functions
Use case #3
{JSON}

27.
Functions
Use case #3
{JSON}

28.
Functions
Use case #3
{JSON}

29.
CloudEvents
CLOUDEVENTS IS A SPECIFICATION
FOR DESCRIBING EVENT
DATA IN A COMMON WAY

30.
CloudEvents

31.
CloudEvents
CloudEvents on public cloud
https://azure.microsoft.com/de-de/blog/announcing-first
-class-support-for-cloudevents-on-azure/
Contributors
https://github.com/cloudevents/spec/blo
b/master/community/contributors.md
Azure Event Grid

32.
WHY
SERVERLESS ON KUBERNETES ?

33.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Developing on Kubernetes is not easy
1. It’s not the right abstractions for end-developer
experience (eg: deployment, service, ingress, hpa,
monitoring)
2. But it’s a great platform to build a PaaS on top of
it: Primitives, Extensibility

34.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Developer experience
Have to do Want to do
Write code

35.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Developer experience
Have to do Want to do
Write code
Build docker image

36.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Have to do Want to do
Write code
Build docker image
Push docker image to registry
Developer experience

37.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Have to do Want to do
Write code
Build docker image
Push docker image to registry
Expose to internet
Developer experience

38.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Have to do Want to do
Write code
Build docker image
Push docker image to registry
Expose to internet
Set-up monitoring
Developer experience

39.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Have to do Want to do
Write code
Build docker image
Push docker image to registry
Expose to internet
Set-up monitoring
Set-up autoscaling
Developer experience

40.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Have to do Want to do
Write code Write code
Build docker image
Push docker image to registry
Expose to internet
Set-up monitoring
Set-up autoscaling
Developer experience

41.
BUILD A SERVERLESS
EXPERIENCE ON KUBERNETES

42.
Knative
● Something to wake-up your workloads on request
● Something to scale-up and scale back to zero
● Something to turn your code into a container
● Something to collect metrics and export telemetry
● Traffic splitting and rollout strategies
● An eventing system with configurable sources and subscribers
DIY FaaS on Kubernetes

43.
Knative
Kubernetes-based platform to build deploy and manage modern
serverless workloads.
Knative offers features like scale-to-zero, autoscaling and eventing
framework for cloud-native applications on Kubernetes.
https://knative.dev
KNATIVE

44.
Knative
Knative collaborators

45.
Knative
Knative building blocks

46.
Knative
Knative building blocks

47.
Knative
What is Knative
● A set of building blocks to construct your own Paas/FaaS
○ Abstracts common Kubernetes API objects (Build, Deploy,
Serve)
● An abstraction on top of Kubernetes
○ It’s still Kubernetes: It just run containers.

48.
Knative
Knative serving
1. Scale-up and scale back to zero
2. Fine-grained traffic routing
3. Automatic metrics and telemetry
4. Point-in-time snapshot (revisions)

49.
Knative
Knative eventing
1. A complete eventing system
for event-driven apps.
2. Easy for developers to
consume events
(CloudEvents spec)
3. Pluggable, Customizable
Event Sources.

50.
Knative
Knative build

51.
Knative
Knative build
“Deprecating Knative Build would resolve this confusion as it would make it clear that the
"building the service(s) image" part is not Knative's responsability and user can use whatever
tools is capable of doing that — preferably Tekton Pipelines 👼.”

52.
Knative
Tektonik pipeline
1. The Tekton Pipelines project provides Kubernetes-style resources for
declaring CI/CD-style pipelines
2. Builds are ran completely within Kubernetes (no need of Docker)
3. Build Templates are prepackaged descriptions of different ways to
build code (Kaniko, Buildpacks and more)

53.
Knative
Knative-based platforms

54.
Knative
● As a developer: Use it directly to deploy your stuff in a more
streamlined way than raw Kubernetes.
What you can do with Knative

55.
Knative
● As a developer: Use it directly to deploy your stuff in a more
streamlined way than raw Kubernetes.
● As an operator: Put a level of abstractions between Kubernetes
and your devs; Keep the costs under control by scaling to 0
unused workloads.
What you can do with Knative

56.
Knative
● As a developer: Use it directly to deploy your stuff in a more
streamlined way than raw Kubernetes.
● As an operator: Put a level of abstractions between Kubernetes
and your devs; Keep the costs under control by scaling to 0
unused workloads.
● As a platform architect: Build your own PaaS/FaaS platform,
relying on the Knative primitives.
What you can do with Knative

57.
KNATIVE-NATIVE
PLATFORMS

58.
Knative - Pivotal Riff
Pivotal Riff
1. Open source project from Pivotal Vmware
2. Deep Kubernetes integration using CRDs
3. Pluggable application runtimes [Core, Knative...]
4. A custom builder based on buildpacks.io (source to container)
5. A custom cli tool “riff” to manage the entire lifecycle

59.
Knative - Google Cloud Run
Google CloudRun
1. Fully GCP managed beta
Serverless platform based on
Knative
2. Event-driven architecture (HTTP +
Pub/Sub)
3. Cloud Run on GKE + Anthos (aka:
GKE-on prem)
4. A sort of managed Knative + Istio
Credits: https://twitter.com/ahmetb/status/1116041166359654400

60.
Knative - Openshift serverless
Openshift Serverless
1. OpenShift Serverless is a Technology Preview feature only (not yet
supported)
2. Based on Knative Serving + Eventing + Tekton pipeline
3. Can be integrated with other OpenShift services, such as Pipelines,
Service Mesh, Monitoring and Metering

61.
BREAKING NEWS!

62.
BREAKING NEWS
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/02/google_knative_will_not_be_donated_to_any_foundation/

63.
BREAKING NEWS

64.
KUBERNETES-NATIVE
PLATFORMS

65.
Kubernetes-native serverless platforms
➔ Open source platforms
➔ Flexible language runtimes
➔ Custom CLIs
➔ Written in GO (OpenWhisk in
Scala)
➔ Backed by big vendors (Oracle,
IBM, Vmware)
Kubernetes open-source serverless platforms

66.
CNCF Serverless landscape

67.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Serverless on Kubernetes:

68.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Serverless on Kubernetes:
● Container based language runtimes

69.
● Container based language runtimes
● Multi/hybrid cloud and on your laptop
Serverless & Kubernetes
Serverless on Kubernetes:

70.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Serverless on Kubernetes:
● Container based language runtimes
● Multi/hybrid cloud and on your laptop
● Mix and match stateless and stateful workloads

71.
Serverless & Kubernetes
Serverless on Kubernetes:
● Container based language runtimes
● Multi/hybrid cloud and on your laptop
● Mix and match stateless and stateful workloads
● Kubernetes as the operating system for cloud-native
development

72.
Serverless & Kubernetes

73.
In the cloud platforms, Serverless & k8s will essentially converge:
“Kubernetes, just run my code”

74.
GRAZIE