A Solution Looking For A Problem?

Last year, on a date that he is uncertain of, Cisco’s own Pete Johnson saw a tweet that said:

“Serverless is a solution looking for a problem.”

The statement frustrated Pete because he believed it to be untrue. He was a major serverless fan at the time (still is today), and he reasoned that if people out there believed it wasn’t useful, it was the fault of the serverless community for not doing enough to educate the masses about it.

So instead of rolling his eyes and getting up to grab a snack like most of us do when someone on Twitter says something we disagree with, Pete decided to try to fix the problem by starting an open source project. (He’s that kind of guy.)

The project is called FONK, it’s a serverless LAMP stack for Kubernetes, and that’s all I’m telling you because I don’t want to ruin the narrative. If you want to hear the rest of the story about what he did, how he did it, or how it may be useful to you and your team, I encourage you to tune in to this week’s episode of Cloud Unfiltered (iTunes, SoundCloud, YouTube).  There, you’ll hear Pete–who also happens to be co-host of this podcast–and key collaborator Julio Gomez discuss:

What FONK stands for

What Lambda is (yes, you probably already know, but just in case…)

Which of the most popular FaaS runtimes are most Lambda-like, and which are most Kubernetes-like

Use cases for serverless applications

The benefits of a serverless approach

How a fondness for vintage guitars can sometimes suck you into an open source project

If you’d like to learn even more about FONK than the podcast episode provides, here are a few more assets to check out:

Codemotion FONK session site and recording (in glorious Spanish)

Upcoming Pixels Camp event site

LinkedIn and Twitter profiles

Vintage guitars website

Julio’s blog

Whitepapers on devops and netdevops