The Service Tooling initiative in SPLab is focused on investigating and developing tools to make it easier to work with new cloud service models, in particular Serverless Computing and Applications. Serverless Computing heralds the dawn of a new age in Cloud Computing, facilitating interaction with computing resources at much higher levels of abstraction which will make management of cloud based applications much easier, deliver increased security and ultimately improve developer experience and productivity. Although usage of Serverless Computing is seeing significant growth – particularly around the AWS Lambda ecosystem – we are still in the early stages of adoption of the Serverless paradigm and there is much work to be done to understand what constitutes Serverless (and what does not constitute Serverless!), understand how it impacts application architecture, development and management as well as understanding what new tooling is needed to support this Brave New World.
Serverless Computing today is characterized by the dominance of a single cloud vendor offering a proprietary platform, albeit a very comprehensive one. As with the Virtual Machine world and the Container world, the IT industry will realize that Serverless solutions dependent on a single vendor do not meet all needs and Open Source solutions are key to delivering multi-cloud solutions. Further, a key differentiator for Serverless technologies is that they will facilitate much easier integration with vertical specific problems/issues and we are already seeing advanced organizations adopting Serverless solutions tailored to their verticals.
As with previous waves in Cloud Computing, new tooling will be necessary to support this new paradigm. The Service Tooling initiative in SPLab focuses bringing on using its expertise and understanding of diverse Cloud Computing technologies to research and develop solutions and tools for Open Source Serverless platforms to make them easier to work with and manage.
Objectives
- Investigate and develop best practices for deploying and configuring multi-cloud Open Source serverless platforms
- Develop tooling which will make it easier to deal with the significant integration challenges arising in the serverless context
- Perform bottleneck analysis and more general performance analysis in integrated, distributed serverless contexts
Outputs
- Recent outputs
- A series of blog posts on setting up Openwhisk and Knative and comparing these two technologies
- Blog post on integration of databases with serverless platforms
- Previous outputs
- Tools
- Snafu – An experimental FaaS runtime https://github.com/serviceprototypinglab/snafu
- Termite – Semi automated conversion of Java applications to AWS Lambda functions – https://github.com/serviceprototypinglab/termite
- Podilizer – Semi-automated conversion of Java applications to Lambda functions – https://github.com/serviceprototypinglab/podilizer
- Papers and other research outputs
- Tools
For more information, contact Seán Murphy who champions this topic and is looking forward to explore new serverless and service ecosystem ideas and to design powerful tools which work better than anything on the commercial market.
