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New foray into serverless - announcing library shift

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Red Hat has been exploring serverless (aka FaaS) through the Fabric8 Funktion project. It has been long due for us to get serious on the subject. We are turning all of our libraries into services starting today. This is going to be a multi year effort but we are committed to it.

We thought hard and long about which service to start with. In our performance lab, we realized that the slowest and most expensive part of serverless functions was CPU branch misprediction. In a serverless approach, you want to squeeze as much operations per CPU cycle as possible. Any misprediction has huge consequences and kill any of the mechanical sympathy effort we put in libraries like vert.x.

In our experiments, we found that the optimal solution was to get rid of if branches in serverless functions. We are proud to introduce IF as a Service or IFaaS (pronounced aye face). Your code changes from:

user = retrieveUserProfile();
if ( user.isCustomer() ) {
    displayAds();
}
user.extractRevenu();

to

user = retrieveUserProfile();
if ( user.isCustomer(), "displayAdFunction" );
user.extractRevenu();

We have been using it for a year now and forked the javac compiler to convert each if branch into a proper if service call. But we also completely re shaped how we write code to pure linear code, changing all if primitives with their service call equivalent. This is great because it also fixed the tab vs space problem: we no longer have any indenting in our code. Two stones in one bird ! I cannot emphasize enough how much development speed we gained in our team by fighting less on each pull request against these tab bastards.

The good thing about this external if service is that you can add a sidecar proxy to cache and simulate branch predictions on OpenShift and scale then horizontally ad nauseam. This is a huge benefit compared to the hardcoded and embedded system that is a CPU. We typically change the branch implementation 3 to 5 times a day depending on user needs.

FAQ

Is else a function too?

Else is not part of the MVP but we have it working in the labs. We are currently struggling to implement for loops, more specifically nested ones. We have HTTP error 310: too many redirects errors.

Where can I download it ?

You can’t, it’s a service dummy. Go to <ifaas.io>.

Can I use it in Go?

Goggle did not accept our pull request. We have a fork called NoGo.

What is the pricing model?

The basic if service is and will remain free. We are working on added values with pro and enterprise plans.

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