“Serverless” is a word used to describe functions that get deployed and run without the developer having to manage the infrastructure explicitly.

Instead of creating a server, installing the dependencies, and executing your code, the developer just provides the code to the serverless API, and the serverless system takes care of the server creation, the installation, and the execution. Serverless was first offered with the AWS Lambda service but has since been offered by other cloud providers.

There have also been numerous open source serverless systems. On SE Daily, we have done episodes about OpenWhisk, Fission, and Kubeless. All of these are built on the Kubernetes container management system. Kubernetes is an open-source tool used to build and manage infrastructure, so it is a useful building block for higher level systems.

Chad Arimura is the VP of serverless at Oracle, where he runs the Fn project, an open source serverless platform built on top of Kubernetes. In the past, he ran Iron.io, a message broker platform. Matt Stephenson also joins the show–he is a senior principal software engineer at Oracle and has experience from Amazon and Google, where he worked on Google App Engine (which was arguably one of the first “serverless” platforms).

We discussed why there are so many different serverless tools built on Kubernetes, and the tradeoffs that these serverless tools are exploring.

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