Event-Driven and Serverless Programming with OpenWhisk

Agenda

5:45 - Doors open. Networking. Refreshments.
6:30 - Talk #1: "OpenWhisk on IBM Bluemix" by Ioana Baldini
7:15 - Q&A break
7:30 - Talk #2: "OpenWhisk internals: The action container model" by Philippe Suter
8:15 - Wrap-up.

Talk #1. "OpenWhisk on IBM's Bluemix" by Ioana Baldini

OpenWhisk (https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk), a serverless computing platform, is a great way to bring event-based programming to your microservices architecture. During this talk, we will go through basic concepts of serverless platforms and discuss in more detail the architecture of OpenWhisk. We will conclude with a live demo of using OpenWhisk with IBM's Bluemix Services and third-party (even open source!) services.

Talk #2 "OpenWhisk internals: The action container model" by Philippe Suter

OpenWhisk supports actions written in JavaScript, Swift, Java and Python. In this talk, we will explore the internals of OpenWhisk to learn how these actions are created, stored, and executed. We will dive into the (internal) specification that makes supporting such a variety of runtimes feasible, and will illustrate it by implementing, as a running example, support for a new language.

About the speakers

Ioana Baldini is a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, currently working on cloud infrastructure. Her main project is OpenWhisk, an open source serverless computing platform: http://openwhisk.org . This summer, Ioana started a joint project under the Data for Social Good program at IBM working with Multiple-Sclerosis data. In the past, Ioana worked on different projects ranging from computer architecture and runtime systems to application performance and heterogeneous computing platforms with GPUs and FPGAs. Ioana got her PhD from University of Toronto in 2012. During her grad studies, she interned with IBM Research and Intel Labs. While in grad school, Ioana obtained several scholarships, including the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship (NERC is the NSF equivalent in Canada), the Google Canada Anita Borg Scholarship and the IBM PhD Fellowship.

Philippe Suter is a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson, working on OpenWhisk. His interests lie in high-level programming models that improve developers' experience. He obtained in 2012 a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL), where he worked on formal specification, verification, and synthesis of functional programs.