Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service with Vikram Sreekanti
Software Engineering Daily · softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Show Notes
Serverless computing is a way of designing applications that do not directly address or deploy application code to servers. Serverless applications are composed of stateless functions-as-a-service and stateful data storage systems such as Redis or DynamoDB.
Serverless applications allow for scaling up and down the entire architecture, because each component is naturally scalable. And this pattern can be used to create a wide variety of applications. The functions-as-a-service can handle the compute logic, and the data storage systems can handle the storage. But these applications do not give the developer as much flexibility as an ideal serverless system might. The developer would need to use cloud-specific state management systems.
Vikram Sreekanti is the creator of Cloudburst, a system for stateful functions as a service. Cloudburst is architected as a set of VMs that can execute functions-as-a-service that are scheduled onto them. Each VM can utilize a local cache, as well as an autoscaling key-value store called Anna which is accessible to the Cloudburst runtime components. Vikram joins the show to talk about serverless computing and his efforts to build stateful serverless functionality.