DEV Community: Nuvolaris

Apache OpenServerless project

Nuvolaris — Tue, 28 May 2024 10:15:39 +0000

Hello everyone, we are happy to announce that we submitted the OpenServerless project to the Apache Software Foundation. We are going to develop our Nuvolaris Community into a worldwide open source project at the highest level.

The goal is to provide the open source foundation of our Nuvolaris Enterprise
product as a vendor independent and stable project maintained by a community.

To achieve this goal, we have submitted the Apache OpenServerless proposal is the natual step. The link to the proposal can be found here:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INCUBATOR/OpenServerlessProposal

Our codebase is well tested and already has a number of paying and open source customers. We already have a network of contributors who have already contributed to the codebase and we have found the mentors for our project and the champion for the project.

But what is the Nuvolaris community (to become Apache OpenServerless)? There is already an open source serverless engine (Apache OpenWhisk) and I am one of the PMC of the project and also wrote an O'Reilly book about it: Learning Apache OpenWhisk.

What is missing now is a complete distribution including integrated services to build a complete platform. We want the Apache OpenServerless project to fill this gap.

With Nuvolaris Community we provide storage, databases, caches, frontend, IDE, starters and even LLM support on top of OpenWhisk. We have made this available and running on all major cloud provider Kubernetes platforms (EKS, AKS, GKE, LKE) and also for the Kubernetes of all major Linux distributions (RedHat OpenShift, Ubuntu MicroK8S, SuSE K3S).

Simply put, if OpenWhisk is Linux, then Nuvolaris is RedHat. The OpenServerless project aims to be the first complete open source distribution that makes it easy to build cloud-native applications with portability in mind.

And we want to build the platform in the open, contributing our work to the Apache Software Foundation to make it widely available and get more vendors involved in supporting it.

About Nuvolaris and other similar Platforms

Nuvolaris — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 13:07:46 +0000

A question I've been asked several times: what's the difference between your Nuvolaris and the other X-Platforms and Y-Distribution for Kubernetes that are out there?

My answer is that they are a Web Agency with an ad hoc platform, and we are doing WordPress.

The thing is certainly not very clear if one does not put one's mind to what happened when the Web exploded (and a similar process occurs punctually in every industry where there is a novelty).

When there is big news, as there was when the Web exploded, there are customers who want to go to the Web. You, entrepreneur sniffing the air, what do you do? Well, you open your own company that makes Web sites and set yourself up for customers who want to go on the Web.

The problem is that the moment you approach the market in this way, to give customers what they want, you sell "work" and use what you can find to do it, raking in what is available. Which generally means building custom websites. Handmade. Handcrafted. In short, you make a web agency.

Generally, then the WebAgency moves forward a bit, bundles the solutions it has provided to a few clients, renames them "standard solution," and starts selling its "CMS," its "platform".

Which then is usually not CMS, but is instead a semi-finished product, some reusable code, and the people who know how to do the work. And that is exactly what the various X-Platform and Y-Distribution companies are doing in the cloud today.

The fact is that this approach doesn't last much longer. Any domain tends toward standardization. Some products emerge, and gradually the various "ad hoc" solutions of the web agencies are set aside.

Those companies that 10 years ago had their own homemade CMS now use WordPress. Or Drupal. Or Adobe AEM. But they basically didn't make the product, they adapted it to someone else's product.

Those who have thought about a big market, on the other hand, have built a product. They invested (and a lot). They created a generic solution and evolved it on the demands of not three but 300 or 3000 customers at the same time.

This is the difference between Nuvolaris and other cloud companies with their platform. They are a "cloud agency" with a platform but in fact, they are 80% service and 20% product.

Nuvolaris builds on an open-source product, serves many customers at once with its deployment, and is 80% product and 20% service.

Course on Kubernetes Operators in Python

Nuvolaris — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:29:50 +0000

Hi everyone! Are you still interested in the course on Kubernetes Operators in Python? It's the one related to the operator development for Nuvolaris?

Here you go...we have started!

We conducted the first class during the first Nuvolaris community call.

Don't worry if you've missed it!

We will post a video of the lecture soon (we need some time to extract it from the recording). But we've only covered the basics in the video: Summaries of Kubernetes fundamentals, CRD and Kustomize.

If you are interested, you can join us in the nuvolaris-operator channel on Discord: https://discord.gg/RrJqXa9S

You can contact us here and we'll organize the next class.
In the meantime, check out the slides and the code in the nuvolaris/nuvolaris-operator repo on GitHub: https://github.com/nuvolaris/nuvolaris-operator.

Dilemma: should I choose Serverless or Kubernetes?

Nuvolaris — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:02:48 +0000

The dilemma everyone who wants to develop cloud-native applications faces today is: should I choose Serverless or Kubernetes?

Serverless offers a gentle introduction to the cloud. You need to write your code, send it to the cloud and it will run automagically. The cloud provides all the services you need including automated scaling.

However serverless today means vendor-lockin. You have to adopt and build your applications on top of the services of a single cloud provider. So you are building your house on leased land.

Because vendor lock-in is not acceptable for any forward-looking business, today most of them avoid serverless and go after the most widely used multi-cloud solution: Kubernetes!

However, Kubernetes comes with a significant burden of complexity. It is both bare bone and rich in different plugins, so you have to configure and deploy many services on it. It can take months before it is ready to be used.

In the end, businesses need the productivity of Serveless with the control of environments and deployments granted by Kubernetes. This is the problem that Nuvolaris wants to solve.