Yaron Haviv, iguazio | AWS re:Invent 2017
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2017-11-29

Yaron Haviv, Founder & CTO, iguazio | AWS re:Invent 2017

#reInvent #theCUBE 

https://siliconangle.com/2018/01/08/doting-developers-could-make-2018-the-year-of-serverless-computing-reinvent-thecube-guestoftheweek/

Doting developers could make 2018 the year of serverless computing

Building and deploying software with serverless computing functions is easier and cheaper than the worn infrastructure-first route. It may also be better than containers’ virtual method for running distributed software applications for some net-new applications. And new efforts are smoothing rickety on-premises-to-cloud portability. With such momentum, it seems nothing can keep 2018 from being the year of serverless technology.

But first, why has this trend been labeled “serverless?” After all, when a serverless application runs, there’s a server or servers somewhere thrumming along. Some say “serverless” is simply the term marketers have glommed onto; anyone who sells to software developers will understand why. “As developer, you’re sort of avoiding [information technology],” said Yaron Haviv (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of Iguazio Systems Ltd. In other words, the list of things a developer must deal with in order to design and deploy an app is “serverless.”

“You open a nice portal, you write a function, or you write your function in a GitHub repository somewhere, you click on a button, and it gets deployed somewhere,” Haviv said.

Pre-defined events trigger code that developers write to execute a specific function. There is no need to rent cloud server instances in advance to provide for the functions. Instead, the cloud provider automatically provisions the resources needed for each executed function. This not only cuts burdensome infrastructure provisioning from developers’ agendas, it can also whittle costs enough to win enterprise customers, and adversely pain those cloud providers without a competitive serverless offering.

Practical, on-prem models have been lacking, but Iguazio — known for its unified data platform — is filling the void with its open-source serverless platform for multicloud and edge deployments, Nuclio. Haviv compared Nuclio to serverless offerings from Amazon Web Services Inc. and others during an interview at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. He spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Yaron Haviv in our Guest of the Week feature.

Containers give legacy legs in cloud
At last month’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas, serverless tech and the Kubernetes container orchestration management platform dominated conversations. Both containers and serverless computing methods have adoring cloud-native developer fan bases. Yet the two technologies differ on some salient points. For enterprises juicing up legacy apps with cloud-native-esque agility, serverless and container methods diverge widely in what they can offer. 

Containerizing legacy applications and then deploying them in a public cloud is pretty standard fare for hybrid cloud providers. It’s the go-to solution for many who believe it’s the easy way to modernize legacy apps. Some argue this method is lazy, glossing over legacy app modernization instead of fully upgrading with cloud-native capabilities. 

Haviv has been an outspoken critic of the container-to-cloud cure-all, seeing some companies as peddling. “They focus on refactoring legacy or monolithic apps to run in containers and gain minimal packaging automation benefits without the agility, elasticity and [Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment] benefits. They may as well keep those apps in [virtual machines] and just forget about it,” he wrote in a dzone.com article last year. 

But what else are companies with barrels full of of legacy applications to do? If refactoring monolithic applications for containers is less than ideal, at least it’s possible. Only the most reckless developer would attempt to refactor them for serverless, which is why containerization methods aren’t likely to be abandoned anytime soon.

“Don’t count on public cloud providers to stand by and watch their market share go away as containers take the majority of the legacy migration market between the two technologies,” cloud computing expert David Linthicum wrote on Datamation.com last November. “They are already expanding language, storage and data support for these tools, and both Microsoft and AWS will soon be in their third generations.”

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Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Iguazio Systems Ltd sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Iguazio Systems Ltd nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)