GeekWire Cloud Tech: Serverless and Containers: a Match Made in the Cloud

Presentation by Donna Malayeri, Product and Community Manager, Pulumi at the 2018 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit: geekwire.com/cloudsummit

Serverless represents an evolution of cloud computing. In the early days, there were only virtual machines, and now there are containers, container orchestrators, serverless computing, and more. Even though serverless has created a big shift in how modern applications are developed, most applications are not architected in an entirely serverless way — nor should they be. Applications now use a combination of serverless and containers. Each have their own strengths: when you want code to scale on demand, without explicitly provisioning compute resources, serverless is a good fit. For existing code, or when you need control over the execution environment, containers are a great choice. And, lightweight container services such as AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances further blur the boundary between containers and serverless. Serverless is not all-or-nothing, it’s really a spectrum. Through real application examples, this talk will describe guidelines for when to use containers and when to use serverless functions. Serverless and containers really are better together — learn how to have the best of both worlds.