Serverless functions allow code to be deployed without worrying about managing servers and the like. In this chapter, readers will learn how to deploy serverless functions on AKS directly using Kubeless, which will be useful should they be required to provide serverless functions within their organization network. The reader will also integrate AKS-deployed applications with Azure Event Hubs. We will be covering the following topics in brief:
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The popularity of AWS Lambda, the serverless compute platform, has resulted in many frameworks that allow similar functionality, both as cloud provider-managed (for example, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM Cloud Functions) and self-managed frameworks. Kubeless is one of the self-managed ones. As in any new fast-moving technology, there is no clear winner yet. Here are some open source alternatives to Kubeless that are Kubernetes friendly:
Serverless functions mainly use events to trigger their invocation. While the following invocation is useful for testing and debugging purposes, it is not really useful for other purposes. Serverless functions excel when they are run on demand and, in general, as part of some automation triggered by events. Calling them manually, as we are doing in the following code, is useful only for testing and debugging purposes:
kubeless function call hello --data 'Hello world!' -n serverless
To be really useful, we need the ability to trigger it through events. One of the easiest ways to integrate our serverless functions with events is to use Azure Event Hubs. In this section, we will integrate Azure Event Hubs with our serverless functions. We will be using Azure Functions to call our serverless function.
This chapter was all about installing Kubeless to successfully run our first serverless function. In the latter part of the chapter, we integrated our Kubeless serverless functions with events using Azure Event Hubs. By using smaller code that is loosely coupled, we can now make faster independent releases a reality in our organization. The next and final chapter will cover future steps, where we will be pointed to different resources and can learn/implement advanced features in security and scalability. For this chapter, please refer to: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Next_Steps.pdf
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