Serverless for Containers

Docker for Rails Developers — by Rob Isenberg (87 / 119)

👈 CaaS Platforms | TOC | How to Decide What’s Right for Me? 👉

Much fuss has been made about the name serverless computing,[94][95][96] but putting that aside, there’s a growing demand for ever-more-abstracted services.

Popularized by services like Amazon’s AWS Lambda,[97] Serverless Computing has become synonymous with Functions as a Service (FAAS). You supply some code to be run when a particular event occurs, and the platform takes care of how and where it’s run. Although the code you supply is typically turned into containers behind the scenes, that’s an implementation detail you don’t need to care about. The benefit to this computing model is that you completely remove the need to provision infrastructure, and scaling happens automatically based on load.

However, a major downside is that you are limited by the languages and tooling supported by the FAAS platform.[98] If, instead of supplying raw code files, you provide your own Docker images, you get all the benefits of FAAS, but with fewer runtime limitations. Rather than being constrained by the platform, you have full control over what languages and tooling your code uses.

Sound too good to be true? Well, the future is already here — at least, a limited version of it. There are only two offerings so far, but no doubt more will gradually appear, and the services will continue to mature.

AWS Fargate[99] is a new platform from Amazon that puts a serverless spin on their ECS and EKS services. Both ECS and EKS, by default, require some manual steps to create the EC2 instances that will run the containers. Fargate is a drop-in replacement compute engine for ECS and EKS that removes the need to think about and manage server instances.

How does this work in practice? You specify your containers, as well as config regarding how the containers should be managed at runtime. Based on the CPU and memory parameters you set, Fargate will automatically scale your containers up or down as necessary, based on load; you don’t need to care where or how they’re run.

Fargate containers can be used to run one-off, short-lived tasks — much like AWS Lambdas. In addition, Fargate is currently the only Serverless offering that supports traditional-style applications and microservices.

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