The container technology is very mature today. Docker, the software package that helps popularizing containers, is now being used by hundreds of thousands of developers as their day-to-day DevOps tool. I would say that Docker, the container engine, has now become a boring piece of software. For an infrastructure-level software package, boring means high quality and stability. I use it every day and I know you all use it as a part of your tool chain too. But we no longer feel excited when a new version of Docker is released. Just like what we feel to the releases of Linux kernels. With this feeling, the golden age of container has just recently passed, in my opinion.
The rise of Docker was in 2013. Its Renaissance was during 2014 - 2016. Many orchestration engine races between Docker Swarm and Kubernetes were at their peaks in 2016. One of them, the Swarm2K project, was my once-in-a-lifetime event. Docker later had an announcement to also support Kubernetes in 2017. The race ended there.
A couple of days ago, in March 2018, just before publishing this book, its founder, Solomon Hykes, left Docker Inc. Docker, the company, has been slowly and strongly moving from the startup world towards the enterprise business. What does this mean to us? Enterprise means stability, but startup means adventure. Let's move onto the new adventure, the post container—the serverless era.
What we will be talking about in this book is serverless. It is the natural evolution next to containers and microservices, in the different ways. First, a Docker container becomes a deployment unit for a function, a primitive unit-of-work in the Function-as-a-Service or FaaS architecture. Second, the microservices architecture has been gradually evolving to the FaaS architecture. FaaS could actually be anywhere on-premises or in the cloud. When the whole FaaS stack is managed by cloud providers, it becomes completely serverless.
But there will be something in between. Something is called the hybrid serverless FaaS architecture. This kind of architecture is the main idea I would like the readers to find out and enjoy in this book. It is the point where we could balance between costs, managing the servers by ourselves, and the degree of control we should have for our servers.
This book covers all three major FaaS platforms for Docker in detail, OpenFaas, OpenWhisk and the Fn Project. All of these projects are in their early stages and actively become more and more mature. So it is a great opportunity for the readers and me to learn and ride this new wave together. Let's do it.
If you are a developer, a Docker engineer, a DevOps engineer, or any stakeholder interested in learning the use of Docker on serverless environments, then this book is for you.
If you are an undergrad or graduate student, this book is also for you to strengthen your knowledge in the area of serverless and cloud computing.
Chapter 1, Serverless and Docker, introduces serverless and Docker. We will find the relationship between them in this chapter. We will also learn the common architecture crystallized from studying architectures of several FaaS platforms. By the end of this chapter, we will learn how to say hello world using all three FaaS platforms, OpenFaaS, The Fn Project, and OpenWhisk.
Chapter 2, Docker and Swarm Clusters, reviews the container technology, namespaces and cgroups. Then, we will follow this by introducing Docker, how to install it, how to use its basic commands, and understand its workflow for build, ship, and run. Continuing further, we will then move to review its built-in orchestration engine, Docker Swarm. We will learn how to set up a cluster and see how Docker Swarm works internally. We will then learn how to set up a Docker network, attach it to containers, and how to scale services in Docker Swarm.
Chapter 3, Serverless Frameworks, discusses serverless frameworks, including platforms such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and IBM Cloud Functions. We will end this chapter with a FaaS platform-independent framework, the serverless framework.
Chapter 4, OpenFaaS on Docker, explains how to use OpenFaaS. We will explore its architecture and components. Then we will learn how to prepare, build, and deploy functions with its provided tools and templates, how to prepare its cluster on top of Swarm, how to use its user interface, and how OpenFaaS leverages Docker multi-stage build. And we will also discuss how to use Prometheus to monitor the FaaS platform.
Chapter 5, The Fn Project, explores another FaaS platform. Similar to Chapter 4, OpenFaaS on Docker, we will start with its architecture and components, then go through a set of CLI commands to build, package, and deploy functions to Fn. Later in this chapter, we will learn how to monitor the platform using its built-in UI. Also, we will use a familiar tool to help analyze its logs.
Chapter 6, OpenWhisk on Docker, discusses OpenWhisk, the third and final FaaS platform for this book. We will walk through its concept and architecture.
Chapter 7, Operating FaaS Clusters, speaks about several techniques of preparing and operating production-grade FaaS clusters using Docker Swarm. We will discuss how to replace the whole layer of networking with another easy-to-use container networking plugin. We will also show how to implement the new routing mesh mechanism to avoid bugs from the current ingress implementation. Also, we will discuss some advanced topics such as distributed tracing and how to implement it. We will even cover the concept of cost reduction with spot instances and how to implement Swarm on this dynamic infrastructure.
Chapter 8, Putting Them All Together, explains how to implement a heterogeneous FaaS system combining all three FaaS platforms running seamlessly together on a robust product-grade Swarm cluster. We will show a mobile-based bank transfer use case, also with a legacy wrapper, a mobile backend WebHook, and stream data processing with FaaS. A bonus here is we also add a blockchain to the use case to show their interoperation.
Chapter 9,The Future of Serverless, concludes this book with advanced concepts and research prototype implementations that go beyond the current serverless and FaaS technologies.
The reader should know the basics of Linux and Docker commands. Although this is optional, it would be a big plus if the reader has a basic understanding of network protocols and has some familiarity to the cloud computing concepts.
Although it is possible to use a MacBook or PC with Windows OS to run examples in this book, it is highly recommended for the reader to use Ubuntu Linux 16.04 and above. The reader with Mac book or Windows could run examples via Linux on a virtual machine, or a cloud instance.
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There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "We will try the echoit function to hello world with OpenFaaS."
A block of code is set as follows:
FROM ubuntu RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y nginx EXPOSE 80 ENTRYPOINT ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh $ docker swarm init --advertise-addr=eth0
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "The following screenshot shows the browser running OpenFaaS Portal."
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