Serverless Devs Enter the CNCF Sandbox

ecently, Serverless Devs officially became the official sandbox project of CNCF after voting at the TOC regular meeting of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The open source and open serverless developer platform - Serverless Devs is open source by Alibaba Cloud and is committed to providing developers with a powerful tool chain system.

Through this platform, developers can not only experience multi-cloud Serverless products with one click, deploy the Serverless project at a high speed, but also manage the project in the whole life cycle of the Serverless application, and combine Serverless Devs with other tools/platforms very simply and quickly to further improve the efficiency of research and development, operation and maintenance.

Serverless Devs is the first Serverless Tool project of CNCF

In the future, the Serverless Devs community will work with more developers and users to build a serverless application life-cycle management tool without vendor lock, making Serverless simpler and more useful.

CNCF TOC made the following comments on Serverless Devs at the meeting: Davanum Srinivas (CNCF TOC) said that if you are an ordinary developer and you have many Serverless applications to run, you must want to choose which platform to run on. This platform should have templates based on different languages. You can start quickly based on this. Serverless Devs is such a platform. It has prepared many templates to help developers deploy in a Serverless runtime. It allows developers to easily start the journey of Serverless.

Emily Fox (CNCF TOC) believes that Serverless Devs is very concerned about the experience of developers and the deployment of Serverless applications on different cloud platforms.

Serverless Devs project address:

https://github.com/serverless-devs/serverless-devs

Six advantages of Serverless Devs

No vendor lock: Thanks to the pluggable feature of the function, it can easily support project deployment of different cloud vendors or deploy to different cloud platforms with one click. At present, Serverless Devs has supported Alibaba Cloud function computing, AWS Lambda, Baidu AI Cloud function computing, Function workflow, Tencent Cloud cloud function and other multi cloud FaaS products;

Open source construction: The project is built through open source code and open ecology. Developers can view and participate in the contributions of the Serverless Devs developer tool at any time, and can also make contributions to relevant components and applications at any time and anywhere. Of course, in addition to this open source and open form, we also encourage some enterprise-level teams to build their own private registries through the Serverless Registry Model to customize some customized components that are inconvenient to be exposed;

Flexible and pluggable functions: The Serverless Devs developer tool itself does not have any business capabilities. All business capabilities are pluggable in the form of components, and each component can customize corresponding commands and functions as needed; Developers can select different components to complete corresponding business capabilities in an application to meet the demands of different modules;

Simple and quick start: by opening the model/specification of the Serverless Registry, the project can provide developers with hands-on cases in various forms, fields and scenarios through the application mode, to help developers quickly understand, learn, deepen and get started with the Serverless architecture;

Application life cycle management: With component-based support, Serverless Devs can play an important role in the application life cycle. Taking the FC component of Alibaba Cloud functional computing as an example, developers can build and manage projects at multiple levels such as project creation, project development, debugging, and observability;

Good integration and being integrated: The project has very good integration and being integrated. It can be organically combined with traditional ecology through componentization support. At the same time, the Serverless Devs developer tool can also be easily integrated into massive automated processes;

Design philosophy

Serverless Devs is an open source tool chain project in the field of Serverless. It is not only a simple command line tool, but also a complete tool chain system to a certain extent.

In Serverless Devs, you have two roles:

• Open source contributors: open source contributors will develop components/applications according to the Serverless Package Model and publish the content to Serverless Registry, which can be used by more people;

• Serverless developers: initialize applications and use components through developer tools (including command line tools and desktop tools); Deploy business online as expected through developer tools;

In addition, in the Serverless Registry, there are two types of packages: Component and Application:

• Component: refers to the component; It is a piece of code developed and released by Package Developer that conforms to the Serverless Package Model specification. Usually, this code will be referenced in the application, loaded in the Serverless Devs developer tool, and perform some actions according to the predetermined rules. For example, deploy the user's code to the Serverless platform; Build and package the Serverless application; Debugging the Serverless application;

• Application: refers to the application; Package developer can publicly publish it to the Registry for more people to learn and use. For example, a contributor contributed a case of cat and dog identification to the Registry; It can also be developed by Serverless developer, for example, someone has developed an application for face recognition; Generally, an application can reference one or more components and deploy them to the Serverless platform through the Serverless Devs developer tool. For example, I developed an application for cat and dog recognition. In this application, Lambda components are used to help me deploy part of the business logic to the FaaS platform. At the same time, I also use Website components to help me deploy the front-end business code to the object store;

The model design principle of Serverless Devs is to enable developers to focus more on business logic and improve the efficiency of serverless application development, deployment, operation and maintenance through a more simple, scientific and standardized Serverless tool chain system. Developers can use different cloud vendors and open source serverless products in a more flexible and general way, and then achieve more efficient, concise and convenient serverless application management.

Growth history

If Serverless has improved the development efficiency of traditional applications, then the Serverless Devs developer tool has improved the development efficiency of Serverless applications.

With the development of time, Serverless Devs has changed from a simple and simple efficiency improvement to a more standardized and scientific efficiency improvement. We sincerely hope that the tool chain model and thinking of Serverless Devs can provide great convenience and more scientific management for application development and traditional Serverless architecture:

• On October 23, 2020, the Serverless developer platform Serverless Devs was officially opened;

• In November 2020, Serverless Devs was included by CNCF Landsacpe and became the first Serverless tool in China;

• In November 2020, Serverless Developer Meetup was held for the first time and became a new technology channel for Serverless developers;

• In November 2020, it was shortlisted for InfoQ to select the top ten new and cutting-edge open source projects in 2020;

• In April 2021, Serverless Developer Meetup was held in Shanghai and Serverless Devs 2.0 was officially released;

• In July 2021, the Serverless Developer Meetup was held in Hangzhou, and the Alibaba Cloud functional computing team officially released the functions such as end cloud joint debugging and desktop client at the meeting;

• In October 2021, at the 2021 OpenInfra Days China conference, Serverless Devs delivered the keynote speech of "Serverless Devs: Tool Chain Construction for the Full Life Cycle of Serverless";

• In December 2021, Serverless Developer Meetup was held in Shenzhen, and the Serverless Devs Model was tentatively displayed to the public;

• In May 2022, Serverless Devs Model, as the best practice of Serverless tool chain model, appeared at the Cloud Native Industry Conference of ICT Academy;

• In September 2022, Serverless Developer Meeting was held in Hangzhou; Serverless Devs voted at the TOC regular meeting of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and officially became the official sandbox project of CNCF;

Future outlook

Serverless Devs will support:

1. Support more cloud vendors, cloud products:

• Hosted：Azure，Google Cloud Platform

• Installable：Knative，OpenWhisk，Kubeless，Laf

2. Function support:

• Serverless Devs K8s Controller

• VScode Plugin

• Complete Logs capability (Serverless Devs Logs)

• Serverless Devs Cloud

• Global Actions

3. Other planning:

• More forms of Serverless service support, such as the Serverless Application Hosting model;

• Support more BaaS products;

• Explore the direction of IaC;

• Integration with Terraform;