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.

Kubernetes is at the core of the cloud-native transformation. In this talk, we will discuss how Argo Workflows, Argo Events and Knative can help with cost-efficient and extremely flexible orchestration of complex network-intensive services on Kubernetes. We will discuss a Knative based deployment of Argo Workflow and Argo Events and demonstrate how we used these technologies in 5G-MEDIA (http://www.5gmedia.eu/) to orchestrate media intensive network services, such as tele-immersive gaming and mobile journalism in a 5G Edge. We argue that CNCF technologies can very efficiently complement traditional orchestration tools used by telcos, such as OSM, which are not sufficiently flexible to orchestrate highly dynamic session-oriented container based workloads of this kind.

Serverless frameworks enable devops automation, resource allocation on demand and auto-scaling. However, so far they only addressed event-driven workloads and not distributed, batch oriented data science tasks like data preparation and ML training. Orit Nissan-Messing will introduce the recently announced Nuclio ML Functions which is tightly integrated with Kubeflow and extends the Nuclio open-source serverless framework to auto-scaling machine learning, training and data preparation tasks. Nuclio ML functions automatically tracks experiments and artifacts, is seamlessly integrated with Kubeflow pipelines and eliminates a significant amount of devops. Participants will learn how to work with Kubeflow and Nuclio to enable CI/CD for their machine learning workloads, enabling performance and horizontal scaling, while cutting infrastructure costs and tedious development tasks.

Serverless applications are becoming dominate, but all too often they fall short by only supporting stateless functions, when most applications are polyglot in nature and combine both stateless and stateful services. What’s more when you write code, it's not portable across different clouds and hosting platforms. In this session we will dive into the Distributed Application Runtime, Dapr, an open source, vendor neutral project that has gained community attention as it enables developers to combine highly portable, stateless functions and stateful actors using any language or developer framework of their choice. With built in state management, distributed tracing based on Open Telemetry and pub/sub based on Cloud Events you can take advantage of Dapr to build highly available serverless applications that run on any cloud.

The Serverless experience is revolutionary and will grow to dominate the future of Cloud. FaaS however—with its ephemeral, stateless, and short-lived functions—is only the 1st step. It's great for processing-intensive, parallelizable workloads, but limited in use-cases, making it hard to impl general-purpose apps.

What’s needed is a next-gen Serverless platform for general-purpose app dev for our new world of real-time data & event-driven systems. What’s missing is: ways to manage distributed state in a scalable & available fashion, long-lived stateful services, ways to co-locate data & processing, and options for data consistency.

This talk will discuss challenges, requirements, and introduce you to our proposed solution: CloudState—an OSS project building next-gen Stateful Serverless on Akka, gRPC, Kubernetes & GraalVM, with client support for Go, JavaScript, Java, Swift and more.

“Serverless” is one of the most trending paradigms for designing applications, but what most early adopters find out is that doing something more than a “Hello World!” is hard. The more your application is deconstructed into smaller pieces, the more you need better communication patterns. Real-life applications also interact with tons of external systems and managing this complexity is hard.

Camel K is a lightweight integration platform for Kubernetes created specifically to address these issues. It’s based on Apache Camel, the most powerful open source integration framework, and it leverages Knative to deliver integration patterns in a serverless way.

We will show how Camel K works under the hood and, with coding examples, we’ll also demonstrate how Camel K makes it easy is to connect (almost) anything using integration patterns and the 300+ components that Apache Camel provides.

Cloudevents offers a useful specification which can help facilitate new patterns and innovation in several areas of tech. In this session, we will use a hands-on machine learning example to explore how Cloudevents and evented systems can work together. First we will perform an experiment by combining CloudEvents with BentoML and Tektoncd to explore the cross-section of events, machine learning models and CI/CD pipelines. Then, we will use the Kubeflow KFServing project to deploy our models inference service into a canary setup.

WebAssembly is the future of distributed computing. This session explains what WebAssembly is, how it works outside the browser, and why people at a cloud conference should take notice. Attendees will learn how, with the use of a few open source projects, building functions and services in WebAssembly can be easier, faster, and more secure than building traditional services. Demonstrations will include building systems that engage in low-level, RPC-style communication between the runtime host and guest module, then advancing to the examination of a host runtime written in Rust that dynamically and securely binds zero-trust WebAssembly functions and services with high-privilege capability plugins like message broker providers, key-value stores, and more (also written in WebAssembly!).