Developing Provider Independent Functions in the Serverless World

Writing a Serverless function is easy. But deploying that same function to multiple cloud providers can seem impossible. Join the Serverless community in SF for a discussion on how developers are overcoming provider lock-in, creating portability and freedom in their Serverless projects.

Presentations:

Welcome, FaunaDB Team

Welcome from the team at Fauna. FaunaDB is the first adaptive operational database—built from the ground up to scale digital business without compromising productivity or agility.

Multi-Provider Support & The Serverless Function, Brian Neisler

Writing a Serverless function is easy; deploying the same function to multiple cloud providers is hard. Brian Neisler, Product Manager at Serverless Inc. (https://serverless.com/), will dive in to some of the main challenges behind multi-provider support for Serverless Functions and what the Serverless team is doing to solve them. Brian focusses on driving product direction at Serverless while actively trying to simplify the serverless world.

The Serverless Inc. team builds and maintains the Serverless Framework. The open source framework allows you to deploy auto-scaling, pay-per-execution, event-driven functions to any cloud. The framework currently supports AWS Lambda, Apache OpenWhisk, Microsoft Azure, and is expanding to support other cloud providers.

A Real-World Example Using the First Serverless Database - FaunaDB, Chris Anderson

An up close view of the popular todo list serverless-crud example application, extended to allow sharing and collaboration on lists with other users from Chris Anderson, Director of Developer Experience at Fauna (https://fauna.com/). He's extended the serverless-authentication-boilerplate service to use FaunaDB, and return a FaunaDB database connection secret with its authentication token.

The database secret is scoped to the current user, so functions don't need to be configured with broader database access, as the tokens are passed in by the authorizer. This lowers the security impact of garden variety code bugs. For instance, even a bug in your Lambda function, would only impact the data controlled by the authenticated user, instead of having wide ranging consequences if the function was connected to the database with greater privileges. The unspoken benefit here is that modeling your application's access control in a security-aware database is not only safer, it's easier and more productive to code.

Chris is obsessed with bending the physics of the web to give control back to users. He cofounded Couchbase in 2009, kicking off big changes in the mobile database industry. He advises digital economy companies on IoT, big data, sync, and blockchain technology. He’s currently the Director of Developer Experience at Fauna, working to streamline technology adoption. When he’s not writing code he’s riding bikes, making music, and playing with the kids.

Agenda:

Doors open at 6:30pm for refreshments and networking. Talks start at 7:00pm. We'll have more time for refreshments and networking after the talks.

Host: Fauna (https://fauna.com/home)

Sponsor: Cloud Academy (https://cloudacademy.com/)

At Cloud Academy, we’re obsessed with technology and how it’s changing the world around us. Every day developers are creating new software, products and companies with better knowledge and faster tools. As the pace of innovation rapidly increases, cloud technologies are changing the IT industry worldwide. Students, developers and companies are all seeking simple solutions with quick results.

Our vision at Cloud Academy is to enable the cloud community to stay updated and build advanced products with the latest technologies. Today we’re integrated and recognized in thousands of industries worldwide. We think big and look at solving solutions on a global scale while also considering the most important cloud vendors and their ecosystem of smaller technologies and tools. We want to empower and lead future generations of engineers and entrepreneurs in building and creating the next big product and technology.