Introduction to Serverless PHP Rob Allen     June 2018

Deployment options 1. Physical servers 2. Virtual machines 3. Containers Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Container deployments 1. Platform (e.g. Kubernetes) 2. Application (e.g. Cloud Foundry) 3. Serverless (e.g. OpenWhisk) Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Serverless?   The first thing to know about serverless computing is that "serverless" is a pretty bad name to call it.

  • Brandon Butler, Network World Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

AKA: Functions as a Service • A runtime to execute your functions • No capacity planning or load balancing; just tasks being executed. • Pay for execution, not when idle Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Use-cases Synchronous Service is invoked and provides immediate response (HTTP requests: APIs, chat bots) Asynchronous Push a message which drives an action later (web hooks, timed events, database changes) Streaming Continuous data flow to be processed Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Benefits • No need to think about servers • Concentrate on application code • Pay only for what you use, when you use it • Language agnostic: NodeJS, Swift, Python, Java, C#, etc Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Challenges • Start up latency • Time limit • State is external • DevOps is still a thing Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

It's about value Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

When should you use serverless? • Occasional server needs on a static site • Variable traffic levels • Additional compute without extending current platform • Responding to web hooks Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Serverless providers Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

OpenWhisk Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

OpenWhisk OpenSource; multiple providers: IBM RedHat Adobe (for Adobe Cloud Platform APIs) & , of course, self-hosted Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Invoking an action Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Serverless PHP Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Hello world in PHP Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Hello world in PHP Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Running your action $ wsk action update hello hello.php ok: updated action hello $ wsk action invoke hello --result { "msg": "Hello World" } Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Dependencies Zip them up $ zip -r hello.zip hello.php vendor $ wsk action update hello hello.zip --kind php:7.1 Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Web access Add the  --web  flag: $ wsk action update hello hello.php --web true $ curl https://openwhisk.ng.bluemix.net/api/v1/web/
19FT_demo/default/hello.json Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

What to do in your action • Compute! • Store to database • Make API calls to other services • Store to cloud storage (S3) • Trigger other actions Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Demo time! Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

To sum up Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Resources • http://www.openwhisk.org • https://medium.com/openwhisk • https://github.com/akrabat/ow-php-ftime • https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Questions? Rob Allen ~  @akrabat

Thank you! Rob Allen ~  @akrabat