The rise of Serverless Computing

Over the past couple decades the IT industry has moved from your standard deployment of applications and services on physical servers, to virtual servers, to virtual servers in on-demand cloud computing environments.  Not stopping at leveraging your standard hypervisor for virtual servers the last couple years has seen the meteoric rise of the container movement rooted originally in features found in IT such as Solaris Zones, then in out-of-box Linux cgroups and LXC, now popularized with docker delivering a higher level and more approachable developer experience.

One of the main approaches of leveraging containers is to deploy the smallest component of a service as possible (microservices approach) and leverage quick start times of the container and the service running within.  In recent years a new computing paradigm going by the name of "Serverless" is leveraging the power of containers and its core principals to provide a development and deployment experience wherein users only have to worry about their code, and specifically at a function level, and not with the underlying servers, hypervisor, or even container building/deployment.

The Serverless movement has been gaining a lot of momentum and appears that if this pace continues it might leap frog standard container usage providing a higher level abstraction.  Even with all this momentum Serverless isnt for everyone, and not ideal for every application and computing need.

We will cover the basics of Serverless computing, some of its use cases, pros/cons, and an overview of some of the solutions available in the market.  During the open lab portion we will have some self-service Serverless examples to play with to get some hands on use cases.