The Cloudcast #252 - Understanding IBM OpenWhisk

Brian talks with Stephen Fink (@sjfink, Distinguished Research Staff Member @IBM) about serverless computing, the architecture of IBM OpenWhisk, the open source community involvement and the use-cases he sees for this emerging technology.

Show Links:

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Stephen Fink’s Background at IBM
Stephen’s Research Page
IBM OpenWhisk
OpenWhisk Source Code on GitHub
OpenWhisk on IBM BlueMix
[Example - video processing] “Dark Vision”
[Example - video processing] “Skylink”
[Example - “Node Red” coordination for IoT devices]



Show Notes:


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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Give us some of your background in IBM’s Research group.


Topic 2 - “Events-based” and “Serverless” are terms that are starting to become more widely used. What types of challenges (use-cases) did you hear from developers that led you to create OpenWhisk?


Topic 3 - Let’s talk about the OpenWhisk architecture. The OpenWhisk model consists of three concepts:

trigger: a class of events that can happen?
action: an event handler — some code that runs in response to an event? 
 rule: an association between a trigger and an action?




Topic 3a - What are some of the really important things that people need to know about OpenWhisk? How it is different from other serverless frameworks that are starting to come into the market?


Topic 4 - Let’s walk through some of the early use-cases you’ve seen (or built).


Topic 5 - OpenWhisk has gotten some attention because it’s open-source. It’s still early, but where do you expect to see the most contribution - core OpenWhisk or at the edges around things that are specific to application factors?

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