Cloudstate—Towards Stateful Serverless

What is the work that you're doing today?

Cloudstate is Lightbend's cloud initiative, a very high priority for our company. I've been in the role of field CTO helping our customers adopt Lightbend's open source. For the last over three years, I've been Field CTO and now cloud platform evangelist as well. I'm the guy that is out there showing people how to use these things, applying it to interesting use cases, things you couldn't do in the past, like let's create a Spring application app, but have it be completely reactive and use Akka actors underneath the covers. It's a little bit of a different mindshift that I'm representing it, blogging it, hopefully working with other communities to open all our minds on how to build things.

What are your goals for the talk?

The talk is really about easing the construction of distributed applications using tried and true methods, tried and true open source that's fully tested. In this case, it's a reference implementation and includes Akka. It's about providing abstractions, but it's also about providing certain constraints that are helpful rather than actually truly constrain you. Certain constraints, in this case for stateful serverless or what I would like to call Opsless, actually free you and make it possible to be truly Opsless and to have a distributed application that would have taken experts to build will just allow normal developers to build these things and have a good time doing it.

What are your goals for Cloudstate?

Cloudstate is a revolution implementation of a standard that we say is really the only way to build distributed applications correctly, the only way that you can deploy something safely to the cloud. We will we'll come out and say it, there is no other way that you could build this unless you're fully reactive, which is the underpinning of Cloudstate, fully reactive, meaning it's elastic by nature, it's resilient, it's responsive, message driven.