Stateful Function-as-a-Service

PIVOT: screening of The Gentlemen (March 6)
We arranged an alternative program for this evening. As the event takes place at the cinema in Utrecht, we will watch "The Gentlemen" at 18:30. Afterwards (20:45), there will be drinks and snacks at restaurant Speys. Feel free to join us tonight in our private cinema! Obviously, you don't have to pay for your movie ticket ;) Please update your RSVP, such that we know who to expect tonight. Parking will be free during the first 4 hours at parking Jaarbeurs. Show your cinema ticket we provide you with at the check-in, and the staff will give you an exit ticket for the parking.

UPDATE: EVENT CANCELLED! (March 5)
we had to cancel our meetup because of the growing concerns surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. We're currently looking into the possibilities to reschedule and we'll update you as soon as we can.

Update march 3:

• Unfortunately we have some last minute speaker changes. Viktor has had an expected schedule change and is in San Francisco with colleagues. He will be providing his talk via a video. Also, Adil will not be able to attend due to personal circumstances.

• Snacks are provided after the talks. If you want to have dinner beforehand, we can offer you a 10% discount at Speys if you show your Meetup attendance screen when placing your order.

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We're very excited to announce that Viktor Klang (Lightbend), Stephan Ewen (Apache Flink, Ververica), Adil Akhter (ING) and Asterios Katsifomodimos (Delft University) will be speaking on our meetup. While they are all convinced of the serverless approach to things, they also acknowledge its currently unsolved drawback: managing state.

Asterios will start the evening with an introduction to the topic explaining the rise, current state (...) and challenges of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) programming paradigm. Following that, Adil, Viktor and Stephan will introduce their respective approaches to solving these challenges. We will end the evening with a panel discussion, where speakers and attendees get to discuss the topic further. By the end of this session, attendees should be familiar with Stateful FaaS and the various existing initiavies tackling the problem.

Agenda
18:00 Doors open
18:25 Welcome
18:30 Intro to stateful FaaS and rationale - Asterios Katsifomodimos
18:50 Rho - Adil Akhter
19:10 CloudState - Viktor Klang
19:30 Short break
19:40 StateFun - Stephan Ewen
20:00 Panel discussion
20:45 Drinks
21:30 Doors close

About Asterios Katsifomodimos
Asterios is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) working on stream processing, systems for scalable AI/ML and data integration. Lately, his focus also entails solving the state problem in the FaaS paradigm.

About Adil Akhter
Adil is an ML Engineering Lead at ING. In addition, he collaborates with TU Delft on Stateful FaaS research. Part of his research is the development of the Stateful FaaS framework Rho.

About Stephan Ewen
Stephan is the CTO of Ververica, the company behind Apache Flink. Ververica is now working on StateFun, which brings together the benefits of stream processing with Apache Flink® and FaaS to provide a powerful abstraction for the next generation of event-driven architectures.

About Viktor Klang
Viktor Klang is Deputy CTO at Lightbend. One of Lightbend's most famous tools is the scala library Akka. They are now working on CloudState, which is leveraging Knative, gRPC, Akka Cluster, and GraalVM running on Kubernetes. This allows applications to not only scale efficiently, but to manage distributed state reliably at scale while maintaining its global or local level of data consistency, opening up for a whole range of new addressable use-cases.