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Serverless, Show Me the Servers! – A UK VMUG 2017 Presentation

November 16th, 2017 No comments

I was happy to be asked to present at the National UK VMUG about Serverless. I had done the closing keynote last year so pretty relieved that I was at least invited back!

The presentation was similar to the London VMUG presentation I had done in July although updated as the Serverless ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed.

Changes of note since July are the addition of the new and momentum gathering OpenFaas framework, Azure Functions now available in the wild with Azure Stack, AWS adding more Lambda functionality particularly with its announcement that traffic shifting is coming soon for canary releases and blue/green routing. Iron.io bought by Oracle and VMware shutting down Photon Platform and shifting direction to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).

AWS Re:Invent is in less that 2 week’s time so I’m sure there will be plenty more to talk about!

Here are the slides:

Presentation Summary:

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and the new and exciting OpenFaaS. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so critical to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Pivotal Container Service the new Kubernetes based container runtime from VMware as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

I’m heading to Tech Field Day 11 and DockerCon!

June 9th, 2016 No comments
TFD Logo Mosaic logo

Tech Field Day

Tech Field Day 11 is happening in Boston, from 22-24 June and I feel very honored to be asked to participate as a delegate.

This will be my third Tech Field Day event, I previously attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 and Virtualisation Field Day 6. I like the change back to the roots of naming it Tech Field Day as virtualisation is so ubiquitous it has lost its meaning and can in some circumstances be a limiting definition.

I’ll be joined by Alastair Cooke, Andreas LesslhumerArjan TimmermanDrew Conry-MurrayHoward MarksJoep PiscaerJon HildebrandMariusz KaczorekMark MayMatthew Leib and Raff Poltronieri

Great to also have three new faces to the Tech Field Day family, new thoughts and voices are always important and as Tech Field Day covers the whole IT spectrum we have storage and networking specialists in the mix with more generalists like myself.

The format is the same as other events, companies get a chance to present their products which is all streamed live for anyone to view, there’s no closed door policy, what we see is what you see. More importantly you can also join in publicly via the connectedness of social media on #TFD11 or privately via DM/email if you prefer to keep a low profile.

Here are some of my advanced thoughts on the companies presenting:

DockerCon

Equally exciting is on the way to Tech Field Day I’ll be flying via Seattle to be at DockerCon from 19-21 June.

Docker has had so much buzz surrounding it over such a short time its crazy not to get caught up in the excitement and where better to get immersed than at DockerCon itself.

Much has already been written about Docker but we’re only starting to scratch the surface of this new option in microservice delivery for simpler application deployment.

Windows

What is super interesting is that Microsoft is the main sponsor. Yes, a container packaging / management framework built for Linux is being brought into the Windows ecosystem. That is unbelievably powerful.

As workloads start to span clouds and we are able to take advantage of features from different clouds this is hugely important. Being able to first of all describe the config you want whether it is a docker container on Linux or an upcoming Windows Server 2016 native container using the same descriptive language is the operational simplicity we all want.

If you have code that works best on Linux, great, if you have code that works best on Windows, great, but now you can define and orchestrate the building and deployment of two completely different containers environments with the same tools. We’re only starting to see the possibilities and as we see the ecosystem mature there is a huge amount of innovation that will be realised.

I’ll be very interested to see first of all how Docker for Windows will work but also to see how Docker and largely containers are going to play out in the future.

What’s the future of containers and Docker?

  • Are they just a replacement for VMs?
  • How is the security isolation being advanced to further blur the lines between when you need a VM vs needing a container.
  • Is Ubuntu LXC the container hypervisor to rule them all
  • What do people think of the future of VMware and its Photon Platform?
  • Will the innovation for containers largely happen outside the actual container itself and Docker containers become more of an invisible component, great for the community but not so great for Docker itself as a company.
  • How does Mesosphere vs. Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm play out?
  • How will the future serverless platforms run on invisible containers?
  • Are containers just the PDF of infrastructure?

Much to learn, very exciting.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Tech Field Day and DockerCon but isn’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.

Categories: Docker, TFD11 Tags: , ,