Serverless Functions for Beginners
summary
Practical intro to running functions on Kubernetes using OpenFaaS with a lightweight watchdog in each container, Prometheus + Alertmanager for telemetry, NATS for messaging, and an autoscaler that turns a 1-second function into many pods under load (demo hits ~20k requests). Covers good use cases—CPU-heavy jobs, stream processing, ETL, event-driven hooks—and explains containerized build/push/deploy flow, async invocation and cloud events for interoperable event payloads.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Introduction to serverless
- 1:06What are serverless functions
- 2:10From monoliths to microservices
- 3:14Hype vs reality of functions
- 4:57Functions in modern architecture
- 6:43Serverless vs functions as a service
- 7:25Use cases for serverless functions
- 9:31Events and integration points
- 10:34What are events
- 12:03CloudEvents standard
- 13:08Example use case image processing
- 14:10Example use case sentiment analysis
- 15:34Serverless providers overview
- 16:58OpenFaaS ecosystem
- 17:42OpenFaaS architecture
- 21:52Live demo setup
- 23:17Deploying OpenFaaS on Kubernetes
- 24:21OpenFaaS portal and Prometheus
- 26:14Creating a serverless function
- 28:07Building and deploying function
- 30:17Invoking the function
- 31:24Auto-scaling demonstration
- 33:59Closing remarks and future
- 36:46Q&A
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