Under the Hood of Serverless Platforms

Dive into the inner workings of serverless platforms in this 54-minute Devoxx conference talk presented by Google's Monika Nawrot and Marek Biskup. Explore serverless principles, focusing on Google Cloud's offerings such as App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run. Understand process-level resource isolation, execution environments, and how requests and events are served. Learn about the differences between functions, apps, and containers, and why monoliths shouldn't be disguised as microservices. Gain insights into serverless concurrency and billing practices. Follow a practical example of optimizing a text-to-image function, including deployment, testing at scale, memory management, and performance improvements. Discover techniques for better compression, background downloading optimization, and moving computations to the global scope.

Intro
Serverless principles
What is App Engine?
Why App Engine?
What is Cloud Functions?
What is Cloud Run?
Why Cloud Run?
Process-level resource isolation
Code is executed on instances
What is execution environment?
Serving Requests & Events
Functions, Apps, Containers?
Don't pretend your monolith is a microservice
Serverless Concurrency & Billing
Text to image
Function code
Deploy and test at scale
Add memory and test again
Memory leak fixed
Shall we reduce memory? No!
What is the time spent on?
Better compression
Optimize downloading the background
Move computations to global scope
Summary of steps