Yesterday at DockerCon, Ben Firshman gave a demo of building “serverless” applications on Docker and published this blog post. Just before that, I’d published this post comparing Kubernetes and Serverless, since I was asked about it on Software Engineering Daily. In Ben’s post, he claims Docker is serverless. Before we start in on that, let’s review what “serverless architecture” means.
- Reducing maintenance by not running your own platform
- Using third-party services wherever possible to reduce the amount of code you’re responsible for to only what’s truly specific to your business (servicefull).
- Using Function-as-a-Service or nanocompute for the custom code you do need. That way, you only pay when users are actually getting value, minimizing your persistent infra needs.
The demo used was a voting application with parts written in Perl, Python, and Java that all run on-demand in Docker Swarm. Let’s see how this stacks up as “serverless.”
Serverless Docker?
First, a direct quote from the post about serverless vs. Docker:
But serverless doesn’t mean there is no Docker – in fact, Docker is serverless. You can use Docker to containerize these functions, then run them on-demand on a Swarm. Serverless is a technique for building distributed apps and Docker is the perfect platform for building them on.
Well, serverless isn’t really a technique for building distributed apps - it’s about building useful apps, that are often distributed. That aside, containers are not serverless. Containers are a platform, and if they’re provided as a service they fall more into the PaaS bucket. If they’re provided in a way similar to AWS Lambda, where they’re used to process inputs and provide granular, metered compute as a Function-as-a-Service, then they’re FaaS, not serverless.
Using Docker, it is possible to build a Function-as-a-Service platform, which seems to be what Ben did in his example. It uses Docker Swarm to invoke a container with custom arguments. In the demo, a new container is created for every function invocation which would introduce latency that wouldn’t really be acceptable for most user-facing systems.
Even as a FaaS, Docker/Swarm don’t meet all the requirements: there isn’t a fast, automated way to add and remove capacity on the fly. Adding nodes to Swarm requires either Docker-machine or manual intervention. Without capacity scaling, you don’t get the third advantage of serverless. You have to pay for the capacity full time either way, so there’s not really a benefit to this FaaS-on-Swarm compared to running persistent containers on Swarm.
Wrapping Up
And now, the final scorecard. Does Docker…:
- …reduce maintenance by not running your own platform? (nope)
- …help you be servicefull by using more third-party services? (nope)
- …provide Function-as-a-Service/nanocompute for the custom code you do need (also nope!)
So, no. Docker isn’t serverless. Docker could, in theory, be used to build a platform to run serverless applications on, but that doesn’t make it serverless. Docker does do a fine job of making containers user-friendly, and that works for infrastructure and for making applications easier to run and schedule (especially with a little help from Kubernetes).
Keep up with future posts via RSS. If you have suggestions, questions, or comments feel free to email me, ryan@serverlesscode.com .