Function as a Service (FaaS) by Carsten Wiesbaum

In the last few years lightweight and flexible technologies and architectures become the predominant approach for enterprise applications. Besides Microservices, Function as a Service (FaaS) or Serverless Programming is a commonly discussed topic. Some see FaaS as an addition to today’s lightweight architectures, others see it as next step within the evolution of Cloud and IT.

Throughout the last few months I had many interesting discussions regarding FaaS and recognized that many people have problems to understand underlying concepts and identify useful use cases. As result I want to share my thoughts about this topic within a blog series.

Within this article I want to share my understanding of FaaS and why I, as an architect, see it as valuable addition to solve certain problems. To support my argument, I will present an example using a technology most people would not expect when reading about FaaS. In the second article I will reuse my example and show an implementation using Oracle’s fn project, an open source FaaS platform. Finally, in the third article I want to show how to combine fn project functions to solve more complex problems.

Functional Programming

First of all, let us talk about functions. In my opinion functions have the following basic characteristics:

Clearly defined input
Clearly defined action which they execute based on the input
Clearly defined output
Are idempotent, meaning using the same input several times results to the same output each time I execute the function

Let us explain these characteristics using an example. Within the example we use the following data structure as input: Read the complete article here.

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