Building Serverless Applications on Knative

Preface

Serverless has become a major selling point of cloud service providers. Over the last four years, hundreds of services from both major cloud providers and smaller service offerings have been branded or rebranded as “serverless.” Clearly, serverless has something to do with services provided over a network, but what is serverless, and why does it matter? How does it differ from containers, functions, or cloud native technologies? While terminology and definitions are constantly evolving, this book aims to highlight the essential attributes of serverless technologies and explain why the serverless moniker is growing in popularity.

This book primarily focuses on serverless compute systems; that is, systems that execute user-defined software, rather than performing a fixed-function system like storage, indexing, or message queuing. (Serverless storage systems exist as well, but they aren’t the primary focus of this book!) With that said, the line between fixed-function storage and general-purpose compute is never as sharp and clear as theory would like—for example, database systems that support the SQL query syntax combine storage, indexing, and the execution of declarative query programs written in SQL. While the architecture of fixed-function systems can be fascinating and important to understand for performance tuning, this book primarily focuses on serverless compute because it’s the interface with the most degrees of freedom for application authors, and the system that ...