The Fn Project after 2 Months
On this second monthiversary since the open sourcing of the Fn Project live on stage at JavaOne in San Francisco, I thought I’d reflect on its momentum a bit. And coming off Thanksgiving and into the holidays, it’s always nice to remember what we’re thankful for and not forget to admire the beauty of the journey. A journey that we embarked on because of our belief in a few simple truths: first, that serverless is the next frontier for modern app development, and two, that serverless apps should be build on open source stacks and natively multi-cloud.
Bringing new open source technologies successfully to market takes many stars to align including a team that gels, a thriving community, and of course an incredible amount of innovation with a relentless and never-ending focus on user experience and empowerment.
I’m going to highlight some of the projects momentum through the lens of these three things.
Fn Team
“[Teamwork] is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results”. — Andrew Carnegie
When our team from Iron.io joined Oracle to build out an open source serverless platform, like all big companies, there was an existing serverless effort, and I was told to “meet with them and figure it out.” This directive often results in an unpleasant experience, but in our case, it’s been nothing short of a perfect match.
We are now an 18-member and growing team all focused on the Fn Project and pushing serverless innovation forward. I truly believe that a team is the critical kernel of any successful project — and our momentum thus far is evidence of a great one in the making.
It’s too early to publish core principles and values (not going to throw a bunch of generic platitudes at a wall and call it true north) but so far I can tell you that our group embodies humility, honesty, respect, integrity, and passion, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
Now let’s talk about what this team has accomplished in only a few months together.
Fn Innovation
Here’s a list of just some of our recent announcements:
Prometheus Stats Integration
We recently added Prometheus metrics support to the Fn Server, allowing call stats, performance data, resource consumption, and more, to be sent to Prometheus. We are also providing three Grafana dashboards out of the box to save you the time of building them.
Read more about our Prometheus integration in this blog post!
Fn Flow Clustering
Flow is a system that allows developers to build higher-level workflows and orchestrations using idiomatic language constructs. For example, Java developers can build workflows of functions using Java 8 CompletableFuture API methods instead of long declarative JSON. We also have early prototypes of using Flow in other languages. This chunk of work took the Flow system and made it highly available with clustering support.
Check flow out today: https://github.com/fnproject/flow
Hybrid Architecture
While implementing Fn (and it’s predecessor projects) into enterprise customer environments, we found that some installations require the infrastructure executing customer code be separated from the API infrastructure for various reasons — the biggest one being some customers want a serverless platform to be “fully managed”, but still allow the code execution to happen behind a firewall where the code and data never leaves that network. So essentially you get the best of both worlds, a managed service with on-premise strength security.
To achieve this, we’ve been hard at work on what we are calling a Hybrid Architecture, and we’re making this possible with a bunch of work you can track here.
Fn Helm Chart for Kubernetes
Hot off the press at Kubecon, running Fn on Kubernetes has never been easier thanks to a Helm chart developed by the Fn core team.
Visit the Helm charts GitHub page and read more about it in this blog post.
And much more!
- Extensive set of tutorials
- Jax-RS Support
- Spring Cloud Function Support
Fn Community
A healthy and sustainable community is incredibly important to the success of the Fn Project, and ours seems to be shaping up to be just that. We’ve been building everything in the open under the Fn Project GitHub, keeping all discussions public in our community Slack, and posting content whenever possible to open channels such as YouTube.
Here are just a couple great anecdotes demonstrating our community success thus far:
- We launched a custom Youtube channel with over 160 subscribers already watching new content and a Slack channel with over 250 members
- Many companies are launching Fn services or integrating Fn into their own services including a mobile backend FaaS for Gluon, cross-cloud serverless offering by Backand, and a WIP FaaS service on the Hyper.sh cloud.
- Fn presentations at PyCon HK, Devoxx Belgium, Devoxx Morocco, DockerCon EU, Bristol Cloud Native, Serverless Summit India, Bay Area Microservices meetup, and many more!
- Our core team has been involved with the CNCF and helping form a working group focused on serverless computing. It’s an exciting time to help shape (and adopt) the future work coming out of this working group!
But don’t take it all from me… here’s just a sample of what the community has to say:
A Final Word
Although we’re only 60 days in and the journey to ubiquitous multi-cloud serverless computing is still early, none of this would be possible without the backing and support by the core teams employer Oracle, and the vision and leadership of Mark Cavage who leads our “container-native app dev” group.
Let’s keep up the momentum and I look forward to an even bigger “4 months in” post.
Thank you!
Finally, to get involved and be a part of the future:
- Check out our “Good first issues” search in GitHub
- Star the project: github.com/fnproject/fn
- Join the conversation: slack.fnproject.io
- Learn more: fnproject.io
