KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020

Kubernetes and FaaS have solved most of the challenges of dealing with stateless applications. But when it comes to handling state, it quickly becomes “someone else's problem”. Because of that, we have struggled with the same issues of data consistency and complex failure semantics for the past decade. For stateful applications, we are still far from the smooth development and operations experience associated with serverless.
Stateful Functions is a new pattern to solve this problem. It uses containerized, event-driven functions with a stream processor (Apache Flink), not a database, to manage the state and handle the messaging between functions. This talk walks through the ideas behind Stateful Functions and shows how this simple framework solves the problem of consistency and failure semantics within and across functions, at the same time staying true to the serverless experience.