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 discussed OpenFaaS, its architecture, and how we can use it as a serverless framework to deploy functions in Docker Swarm. OpenFaaS has several compelling features, especially its ease of use. This chapter showed that deploying an OpenFaaS stack is quite simple in Docker Swarm infrastructure. Then, this chapter continued to discuss how to define, build, pack, and deploy functions in OpenFaaS. It also discussed an advanced topic of how to tweak and prepare custom templates.

Monitoring OpenFaaS is quite simple, as it comes with Prometheus built in. We only need to install a Grafana dashboard and connect it to the Prometheus data source and we will have a ready-to-use dashboard, helping us to operate an OpenFaaS cluster.

The next chapter will introduce the Fn Project, which allows us to deploy an FaaS platform on a plain Docker infrastructure.