Serverless Functions — Some Like It AOT! by David Delabassee

This post explains how Fn users can use GraalVM and the benefits GraalVM and its Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compiler bring to Serverless Java functions.

Introduction

Fn Project is an open-source, container-native, polyglot FaaS (Function as a Service) platform.

Fn is open-source, one can run Fn on-premises and/or in the cloud; running Fn on a laptop is also convenient for experimentation and development.

Fn is container-native as it leverages Docker. In a nutshell, serverless functions are automatically wrapped into Docker container images (but advanced users can also provide their own Dockerfile!). Fn will take care of all the plumbing, from the creation of the function Docker image to the interaction between the function and the Fn platform to the scaling of this same function, etc.

Finally, Fn is polyglot as it offers multiple FDKs (Function Development Kit) to easily write serverless functions using popular languages such as Java, Go, Node, etc. And given that Fn uses Docker under the hood, it is also trivial to add support for additional languages.

GraalVM is an open source high-performance embeddable polyglot virtual machine that recently sparked a lot of interests in the Java community as it supports Java and other JVM languages such as Groovy, Kotlin, Scala, etc. In addition, GraalVM also supports JavaScript (including the ability to run Node.js applications), Ruby, R, Python and even native languages that have an LLVM backend such as C or C++. GraalVM is incredibly powerful and versatile, it can help in many ways from boosting the performance of Java applications to enabling polyglot applications development that combine different languages in order to to get the best tools and features from different ecosystems. For example, using GraalVM, it is possible to use R for data visualization, Python for machine learning and JavaScript to combine those two functionalities together. Read the complete article here.

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