Industry Talk: Serverless Composition of Serverless Functions

In a few short years, the Function-as-a-Service paradigm has revolutionized how we think about distributed event processing. Within seconds, developers can deploy and run event-driven functions in the cloud that scale on demand. CIOs love the high availability and zero administration. CFOs love the fine-grained, pay-as-you-go pricing model. Most FaaS platforms today are biased toward (if not restricted to) simple functions, functions that only run for a short while, use limited CPU and memory, and process relatively small amounts of data. In this talk, we will get a closer look at FaaS platforms (using Apache OpenWhisk as our exemplar) to understand these trade-offs. Functions are not applications. To build compelling FaaS applications we need to compose functions. In this talk, we will compare approaches to function composition both from a developer and from a system's perspective. We will show how composition can dramatically expand the scope of FaaS.