EA Voices

Oracle Fn – Serverless Computing for the Enterprise

In other blog posts, I have talked about emerging technologies and, when I say emerging, I mean that they are are beginning to “cross the chasm” and become more widely used. 

 

Serverless computing is gaining popularity because it allows developers to focus on the functionality of their code and not be worried about the target deployment environment. You could say it takes a lot of the “Ops” out of DevOps 😉 Developer’s code can scale as needed automatically. Another advantage is that Serverless is elastic in its compute utilization which means you use compute resources only as they are needed in an on-demand fashion. 

 

As Shaun Smith said in his blog introducing the project, Fn is a container native Apache 2.0 licensed Serverless platform that you can run anywhere–any cloud or on-premise. It’s easy to use, supports every programming language, and is extensible and performant. In that blog you learn that Fn is based on technology and a team that has been doing Serverless at scale both pre and post Docker. In fact, Docker is the only dependency. This is key because it means that developers can run Fn projects anywhere; different cloud providers, and even on their laptops for development.

 

For more background on why Serverless is important, see this article “What is Serverless Computing and Why is it Important” by Dylan Stamat from the team that helped create the Fn project.

 

For a enterprise-level technology to take off and become widely accepted, it needs to be open – that is a lesson we have learned since the earliest days of Java all the way through the numerous open source projects that have shaped the landscape. So, Oracle understands the power and usefulness of Serverless computing but, unlike some other vendors, does not believe that it should be proprietary. To the contrary, it should be open source.

 

To get an even more detailed look at why Oracle created the Fn Apache project, read “8 Reasons why we built the Fn Project” Chad Arimura – worth a read!

 

So, Serverless impacts Enterprise Architecture because it is a new model that needs to be worked into many companies ecosystem topographic maps and changes how enterprises need to support custom code in a very positive way.

You can access the Fn open-source project/materials at GitHub  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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