99 Problems But a Container Ain’t One: Forget Serverless, Let’s Talk Containerless Development

99 Problems But a Container Ain’t One: Forget Serverless, Let’s Talk Containerless Development [B] - Julian Friedman, IBM

It’s time to talk about Serverless. Cloud Foundry has always been an opinionated platform that *uses* containers but hides them from users. It famously popularised the motto “Here is my code, run it on the cloud for me, I do not care how”. Now, the Serverless buzzword has repopularised the idea of not caring about Operating Systems, Patching and Orchestration and “just pushing code”. So how is Cloud Foundry (and PaaS in general) different from Serverless? This talk argues that Serverless is an extreme example of an emerging trend towards *Containerless* development: that is, push code, let the platform take care of the low-value bits like containerisation, dependencies, scaling, monitoring and orchestration. Containerless, in 2017, fits in the sweet-spot with regards to Serverless than Containers did compared to PaaS in 2015 -- that is, it is far far easier to migrate existing apps and knowledge to Containerless technologies, like CF, than to Serverless, and that the next big trend in computing is to Containerless platforms, not Serverless.

Whether you are currently using Containers and interested in PaaS or Serverless, or if you are interested in Serverless but considering whether it is right for you and how Cloud Foundry can enable higher-level abstractions this talk is for you!

Julian Friedman
IBM
Product Manager / Software Engineer
Julian is an IBMer and the Product Manager of Garden Core, Cloud Foundry’s Container Engine supporting both buildpack and docker apps. Julian has worked on Cloud Foundry and IBM’s Cloud Foundry deployment, BlueMix, for 4 years and before that on Cloud Technologies, IBM Watson, Large Scale Performance engagements and Map/Reduce for around 10. He holds a doctorate in Large Scale Complex IT Systems. Julian spoke at all of the past Cloud Foundry Summits and at various other conferences, including twice at ContainerSched and at CF Meetups and authored the InfoQ article “Build Your Own Container in Fewer than 100 Lines of Go” which was one of the Golang Newsletter’s 10 most popular articles of 2016.