Cloud Functions meets Microservices: Running Framework based Functions on Knative
11-17, 14:05–14:35 (UTC), The Gallery

Function-as-a-service (FaaS)-style programming and serverless platforms increase productivity, enabling you to focus on application code, with the platform taking care of how to deploy, configure, run, and scale the code. They do however require you to adopt a new programming model, creating generic handlers or actions that lack the expressive APIs that you get from frameworks. Options like Knative not make it possible to make existing server frameworks run "serverless" on Kubernetes - and to go further to enable you to create FaaS applications that are deployed onto pre-configured servers that are pre-configured with liveness, readiness, and observeabiltty.

In this session you'll learn about the methodology by which that can be achieved, and see a live demo of a Functions based application being built and deployed on a serverless server-framework.


This talk covers the recent advances that make it possible to build a deploy serverless applications on a standard Kubernetes basis using Knative Serving. This in turn means that serverless is no-longer limited to using proprietary cloud functions frameworks such as Amazon Lamba, Azure Cloud Functions, Google Cloud Functions or OpenWhisk - you can easily use open source tools to develop and deploy functions that build on existing frameworks, and deploy as serverless workloads on Knative.

This also means that enterprises can drive consistency for their server and serverless deployments - with the ability to use the same configurations and integration with cloud-native capabilities regardless fo whether their developers are programming using server frameworks or creating functions.

See also: Presentation Slides (4.1 MB)

Chris is the Chief Architect for Cloud Native Runtimes at IBM, leading teams that contribute to the open source communities for the Node.js, Java and Swift runtimes. He is also the project lead for a number of open source projects, including the Kitura microservice framework for Swift, the CloudNativeJS collection of Node.js modules, and the Appsody developer tools project.

He has spoken at a number of conferences on various aspects of developing and deploying applications, including at JavaOne, NodeSummit, Node Interactive, SwiftSummit, QCon and the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference.