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

Preparing a production cluster


In this section, we will discuss how to prepare a production Docker Swarm cluster to run FaaS platforms at the cheapest rate possible on AWS Spot instances. The cost of deploying a Docker cluster would be as cheap as running codes on AWS Lambda, but it allows us to control almost everything in our cluster. If the deployment policy is cost-driven, this is the best way to go.

Cost savings with Spot instances

When we are talking about the cloud, its on-demand instances are actually cheap already. However, in the long run, the price of using cloud instances will be similar to buying real machines. To solve this pricing problem, major cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2, and Google Cloud Platform, provide a new instance type, collectively called a Spot instance in this book:

Figure 7.7: Comparison of shutdown signals of a Spot instance on AWS versus Google Cloud

Spot instances are far cheaper than on-demand instances. However, their weak point is the short life cycle...