Book Image

Docker for Serverless Applications

By : Chanwit Kaewkasi
Book Image

Docker for Serverless Applications

By: Chanwit Kaewkasi

Overview of this book

Serverless applications have gained a lot of popularity among developers and are currently the buzzwords in the tech market. Docker and serverless are two terms that go hand-in-hand. This book will start by explaining serverless and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) concepts, and why they are important. Then, it will introduce the concepts of containerization and how Docker fits into the Serverless ideology. It will explore the architectures and components of three major Docker-based FaaS platforms, how to deploy and how to use their CLI. Then, this book will discuss how to set up and operate a production-grade Docker cluster. We will cover all concepts of FaaS frameworks with practical use cases, followed by deploying and orchestrating these serverless systems using Docker. Finally, we will also explore advanced topics and prototypes for FaaS architectures in the last chapter. By the end of this book, you will be in a position to build and deploy your own FaaS platform using Docker.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


This chapter demonstrated a use case by showing how we can develop a mobile payment system on FaaS platforms.

We used Parse as a UI backend. Then we connected Parse to a bank routing function running on Fn via the Parse WebHook mechanism. We then demonstrated that with functions, it was relatively easy to make a call to a modern infrastructure such as blockchain. We simulated two banks to show use cases of a function, a function as a Glue, and a function that wrapped legacy systems. Then we demonstrated how a function was used in conjunction with a streaming agent to process data streams.

All of the three FaaS platforms were linked together and run on the same Docker Swarm cluster. It was quite simple to link OpenWhisk and OpenFaaS functions together, but in the case of Fn, it was a bit of a hack because the current version of Fn doesn't allow you to define a container network.

The next chapter will be the final chapter of this book. We will conclude the concept of a function and look...