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

Chapter 9. The Future of Serverless

This chapter discusses what lies ahead beyond FaaS. We will start by discussing a new experimental technique to restore the speed of the container runtime by introducing RunF, a libcontainer-based runtime designed for invoking immutable function containers. This chapter will continue the discussion of the possibility of using LinuxKit to prepare immutable infrastructure for FaaS platforms in general. We conclude this chapter by exploring a new architecture to hybrid the FaaS architecture on-premises with the serverless architecture on the public cloud.

Before going to these topics, let's start by summarizing what we have learned so far.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • FaaS and Docker reviews
  • Runtime for function containers
  • LinuxKit – immutable infrastructure for FaaS
  • Beyond serverless
  • Declarative containers