Cloudstate Towards Stateful Serverless

The Serverless experience is revolutionary and will grow to dominate the future of Cloud. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) however—with its ephemeral, stateless, and short-lived functions—is only the first step. FaaS is great for processing-intensive, parallelizable workloads, moving data from A to B providing enrichment and transformation along the way. But it is quite limited and constrained in what use-cases it addresses well, which makes it very hard/inefficient to implement general-purpose application development and distributed systems protocols.

What’s needed is a next-generation Serverless platform and programming model for general-purpose application development in the new world of real-time data and event-driven systems. What is missing is ways to manage distributed state in a scalable and available fashion, support for long-lived virtual stateful services, ways to physically co-locate data and processing, and options for choosing the right data consistency model for the job.

This talk will discuss the challenges, requirements, and introduce you to our proposed solution: Cloudstate—an Open Source project building the next generation Stateful Serverless and leveraging state models such as Event Sourcing, CQRS, and CRDTs, running on Akka, gRPC, Kubernetes, and GraalVM, in a polyglot fashion with support for Go, JavaScript, Java, Swift, Scala, Python, Kotlin, and more.