Leveraging Stateful Functions to Power the Next Generation of Event-Driven Applications

Orchestration for stateless compute has come a long way in recent years, driven by technologies like Kubernetes. Going even further, serverless computing and Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) are revolutionizing the way we build and operate stateless applications. However, today both fall short for distributed stateful applications, as state needs to be handled consistently, and stateful service interactions need to be reliable in the face of network, node and software failures. Getting these aspects right makes the difference between a correct and resilient application, and an application that breaks or produces incorrect results under failure.

In this talk, we show how stateful functions can be used to address these shortcomings, combining the benefits of stream processing (here Apache Flink) and FaaS. With these properties, stateful functions form a powerful abstraction for the next generation of event-driven applications.