Pontoon: An Enterprise Grade Serverless Framework Using Kubernetes – As Used in VMware
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2017-12-15

Pontoon: An Enterprise Grade Serverless Framework Using Kubernetes – As Used in VMware Cloud Services [I] - Kumar Gaurav & Mageshwaran Rajendran, VMware

In VMware Cloud services, we perform both batch and real-time computations based on periodic schedules and on-demand events, using our in-house developed serverless framework called Pontoon. This provides better utilization of resources and enables our service developers to write serverless functions with simple declarations.
Kubernetes provides Jobs and Deployments as design constructs to handle such needs, while other frameworks like IronIO Functions, Fabric8, et al aim to solve end-to-end use case . However, we had to extend on top of Kubernetes Jobs & Deployments to define the packaging and I/O interactions of the function, implement a priority queue for execution, and provide declarative retry policy while ensuring high availability. A developer 'writes' a function supporting common EAI patterns for start time parameterized variables, and defines it's packaging and scheduling using a yaml file. The framework then packages it as a Container alongwith an 'observer' container in a pod, 'registers' it with the scheduler while ensuring choice of 'warm' vs on-demand requisite replicas of the pod, and then through a 'Scalar' manages the execution and life cycle of job, while logging and tracing failures/success.
This framework is in use over months in VMware Cloud services and we are now open sourcing it.

About Kumar Gaurav
Kumar Gaurav is working on the first set of services under VMware Cloud Services umbrella, a SaaS offering. He is a veteran in VMware, having built many cloud management products over 9 years and holds dozens of US patents, and few academic publications in Container space. He is the host and organizer of Kubernetes meetup Bangalore chapter. He works out of VMware Bangalore office, as Director R&D.

About Mageshwaran Rajendran
Mageshwaran Rajendran is a lead designer and co-architect of Cost Insight- one of the service under VMware Cloud Services SaaS offering. He has earlier built big data based batch & real-time data pipelines handling TB’s data for financial institution and distributed applications handling high concurrency with specific focus on code quality and long-term maintainability. He works out of VMware Bangalore office, as Staff Engineer.
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