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

Google Cloud Functions


The serverless computing service offered by Google Inc is called Google Cloud Functions (GCF).

We basically refer to it as GCF in this section. Like other serverless platforms, GCF provides both execution environment and the SDK to help us develop and manage the entire life cycle of our function. It provides an SDK to help us get started with the framework. The main language supported by GCF is JavaScript and there is a Node.js Docker image for us to use. With Docker, it is convenient to build a function. When about to deploy, it is relatively easy to deploy it with the Google Cloud CLI tool. It is natural that GCF will allow us to connect to other Google-based services efficiently:

Figure 3.3: A common IoT use case implemented with Google Cloud Functions

The preceding diagram demonstrates one of the common use cases implemented on Google Cloud. It is an example of an IoT pipeline using all Google Cloud services. A Google Cloud Function is used to compute data from the...