Learning Apache OpenWhisk

Preface

This book is for developers who want to learn to use Apache OpenWhisk, a mature, multilanguage, serverless development platform. It provides the knowledge needed to build complex, well-structured, polyglot serverless applications that can be deployed in any cloud or even on-premises.

Why Serverless?

For a long time, companies built their own data centers and bought hardware to install their web applications, mobile backends, or data processing pipelines. But the high costs of building and maintaining data centers eventually led to people renting servers from third parties to reduce costs. Servers are frequently partitioned to “virtual machines,” allowing businesses to pay only for what they need (as opposed to renting a whole server). Eventually, this concept evolved into what today we generically call “the cloud.” The cloud at its core is mostly a “server on demand” service. Modern cloud providers offer a wide range of services but have also become increasingly complex. In particular, one source of this complexity is the need to provision and manage servers. Servers are cattle not easy to raise. They require continuous care and control and must be monitored, cleaned, updated, and occasionally destroyed and rebuilt. Like cattle, they also tend to grow and multiply quickly.

Developers want to forget the server (“serverless”) and develop their application as native citizen of the cloud (“cloud-native”). The focus here is to push the burden of managing the servers onto the ...