Serverless in September

Week of September 30, 2024

Hey all! So sorry that I didn’t write this September. It was a very busy month for me. Before we get into serverless, I want to talk about what was important this September.

September is Suicide Prevention Month here in America. To those who don’t know, I am involved with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), in particular, the Greater San Francisco Bay Area chapter. In the past I would do a personal fundraiser for the annual Out of Darkness Walk but this year I was actually on the walk committee!

It was very involved and a very emotional day! I absolutely acknowledge that suicide is a grim topic and you didn’t come to a serverless newsletter to hear about it but I will leave you with this before we get onto the serverless stuff.

“Be Excellent to Each Other” and check in on people. Many people suffer in silence. Depression doesn’t always look the way you think it should. Struggling with your mental health is not a sign of weakness or moral failure. I would argue that talking about it shows immense strength. Let’s all try to support each other and save some lives!

If you want to support the San Francisco efforts, please consider donating to my fundraiser here.

Okay, now back to serverless. Since this is the only newsletter for September 2024, we will do a “serverless speedrun” where I cover a bunch of big stories for serverless this September. So let’s get started

BBC on Serverless Transformation

I came across this article on the BBC. They created a platform called Web Core and it utilizes serverless technology to run. In particular, they are utilizing FaaS via AWS Lambda.

They describe how they use serverless to host a React app that renders their HTML for bbc.com. They are seeing “100 million serverless function invocations per day” and a performance of aroud 200ms for it to render pages. They also utilize caching to help with resources. This is a pretty awesome use case.

StreamNative Announces Universal Connectivity and Serverless Offerings

A San Francisco startup called StreamNative, founded by the creators of Apache Pulsar announced a few different products including a serverless offering.

Now admittedly, I don’t know much about this company (or Apache Pulsar for that matter) but I did some reading. They are essentially going to offer a serverless Apache Pulsar.

The idea here is that Pulsar runs under the hood but from the perspective of the user, you don’t have to go through a sizing exercise where you try to find the right machine type to run Pulsar.

Their customers can get started in seconds which is almost unheard of in streaming platforms!

On the subject of streaming…

DeltaStream Raises $15M in Series A Funding

DeltaStream is a stream processing platform. The company was founded by Hojjat Jafarpour who is also the creator of ksqlDB. They recently raised $15M in Series A funding to scale their serverless stream processing platform.

What is stream processing? Well platforms like Apache Kafka or Pulsar are used for streaming data. That is, they get data from point A to point B in a consistent manner. But data in and of itself isn’t really useful. You need to make sense of the data.

DeltaStream utilizes Apache Flink to enable their users to actually process the data that is being streamed. This will help users get real time value out of their event streaming. Data streaming is critical for modern applications so being able to get value is a game changed.

What makes it serverless? You guessed it. Pay-per-use and not infrastructure. Between DeltaStream and StreamNative, you may be able to create a serverless pipeline for your data. But where to store it….

Pinecone Serverless goes Multicloud

You heard what I said. Our favorite serverless vector database is now multi-cloud. As a refresher, vector databases are a database that is critical to generative AI, especially when it comes to customization via RAG.

Pinecone really changed the game. In 2019 when they were founded, no one really cared about vector databases. The area was considered very niche. Now, everyone is offering a vector database as a part of the “GenAI Arms Race”.

Pinecone was able to take their open source software and make a hosting service out of it. Their database is serverless as you don’t have to worry about infrastructure, their platform handles that for you. You just worry about using it.

Now that they are multi-cloud, we may see more and more serverless GenAI applications coming soon.

IBM and Qiskit Serverless

So I don’t know how I missed this 2021 story about IBM creating quantum serverless programming. Now I have to admit, I know next to nothing about quantum computing. I understand it at a high level but couldn’t go beyond that.

In short, with traditional computing you have 1s and 0s. Basically the transistors are either on or off. We call those individual 1s and 0s “bits” and 8 bits equal a byte and it goes from there. This is the basis of computing we know today.

Quantum computing uses a “qubit” instead. These units work with the spin of the atom and superpositioning to essentially exist in all states simultaneously while a bit can only be a 1 or a 0. This is way beyond my pay grade but if you are interested, there is a ton of research.

IBM is creating a Qiskit serverless platform. What is Qiskit? It is an open source SDK for quantum computing. What does this mean? Well in short, if you want to “quantum code” (not sure what the proper term would be), this SDK makes it easier. Now where does the serverless platform come in? Well, how many of you have a quantum computer sitting at home?

IBM is going to attempt to give us a quantum platform to run Qiskit code on which is great. I don’t know about you but I don’t think I could even start thinking about how to size a quantum machine. While quantum computing is still very early, I think it’s cool that they are thinking in a serverless manner.

Serverless Security

This is not so much a story as much as an interesting thought piece. Here is an article from SiliconAngle about security in serverless.

Security is important when it comes to cloud computing PERIOD. Serverless may introduce it’s own challenge. As Charles DeBack, threat intelligence strategy lead, Google Cloud, states that “the ability of serverless systems to scale up quickly can be a double-edged sword. Once they gain access, threat actors can exploit this rapid scalability, turning a small breach into a major incident.”

This article is a very good read on the topic and I would encourage reviewing it along with our previous newsletter on the topic found here.

Closing Thoughts

Serverless is amazing. As you can see, major investments are being made in this from companies big and small. Yahoo! recently had an article talking about “Cloud 3.0” and one of the cornerstones is Serverless. This makes perfect sense. The whole idea of the cloud is that you allow someone else to handle the infrastructure. While managing VMs is a necessary stepping stone, the ultimate goal should be serverless.

I am excited to see how many more serverless startups pop-up and how many serverless services will launch!

—Photo courtesy RDNE Stock project on Pexels—