Today’s applications are increasingly built on the cloud. They are highly distributed and reactive, often consuming multiple types of events. They integrate services and platforms to create application architectures with compute (e.g., containers, functions), storage (e.g., object store, key-value store), I/O (e.g., ingest and notifications), and an event bus (e.g., pub-sub). Each of these components can be realized from well-established and proven open source software that can scale for the enterprise.

The prevalence of cloud platforms and services founded on open source software (and upon which modern applications are built) affords the intriguing possibility of releazing cloud-agnostic abstractions (for developing distributed and reactive applications) that (1) eschew the programming complexities associated with today’s mega-cloud providers, (2) offer developers extreme focus and agility, and (3) allow applications to fluidly migrate from the private cloud to the public cloud.

This talk will demonstrate a newly built and developer-focused cloud computer, with fully managed compute, storage, and event routing. It is a cloud-agnostic offering that commoditizes public mega-cloud providers, while offering a familiar programming model and a pleasant developer journey.

Rodric Rabbah was a principal researcher and the technical lead for serverless computing at IBM Research. He created and implemented the core architecture and remains a technical contributor to Apache OpenWhisk, the leading open source serverless platform for functions as a service. His interests span the software stack and aimed at fostering a unified programming model and experience for the serverless cloud with enterprise applications in mind. He is currently creating new things.