Introduction to Serverless on Kubernetes

This course is a part of Introduction to DevOps: Practices and Tools, a 3-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

With the advent of systems like AWS Lambda, the term serverless gained much popularity. However, many people are still unsure what it is for, and how it can help them build applications faster than traditional approaches. Other potential users are turned off by the arbitrary limits and lock-in of cloud-based serverless products.

This course will teach you what “serverless” means and how it can be made portable with open source frameworks. You will get a good overview of the CNCF serverless landscape, and a first-hand experience in building and deploying code, directly to a Kubernetes cluster.

You will build functions using Python and learn how to configure them, manage secrets, add dependencies via pip, learn how to work with binary data, and add authentication. In the second part of the course you will explore the operational side of functions with Kubernetes. This will introduce auto-scaling, metrics, dashboards and how to expose them securely on the Internet with TLS.

If you are a developer or an IT operator interested in exploring new approaches for building software, and prefer to be able to set your own limits when it comes to things like timeouts and choice of programming language, this is the course for you!

What you'll learn

• Understand what serverless is.
• Get an overview of the CNCF landscape around serverless technologies.
• Learn how serverless can be made portable through the use of the Serverless 2.0 definition and Kubernetes.
• Explore the OpenFaaS toolchain, including: UI, CLI and REST API.
• Explore the OpenFaaS ecosystem, including the template store and function store for sharing functions and code templates.
• Build functions using Python, configure them, and use secrets.
• Add dependencies via pip, and learn how to build native extensions.
• Explore how to operate OpenFaaS with: autoscaling, metrics, dashboards, upgrades, custom URLs, and versioning.
• Expose functions securely on the Internet with TLS, and secure them with authentication.