Episode #78: Statefulness and Serverless with Rodric Rabbah

About Rodric RabbahRodric Rabbah is the co-founder and CTO of the serverless computing company called Nimbella. He is also one of the creators and the lead technical contributor to Apache OpenWhisk, an advanced and production-ready serverless computing platform. OpenWhisk is open source and offered as a hosted service from IBM and Adobe. It is also deployed on-prem in several organizations worldwide.Twitter: @rabbahPersonal website: rabbah.ioNimbella: nimbella.comApache OpenWhisk: openwhisk.orgWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xVZhFHmEuKYTranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Rodric Rabbah. Hey Rodric. Thanks for joining meRodric: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about our discussion today. Jeremy: Awesome. So you are the co-founder and CTO at Nimbella and I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about Nimbella, but I'd really love to hear about your background as well.Rodric: Okay, yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity. So, I started Nimbella about two years ago, just over two years ago, and it was after a long stint at IBM for 11 years, and IBM Research specifically. And there I did a number of things that touched on programming languages, compilers, hardware synthesis, and FPGAs. And the last project I really did was creating IBM serverless functions offering, which is now called identify functions, but it started as OpenWhisk. And OpenWhisk is now an Apache project that we have donated to the Apache Foundation four years ago and really is what started my serverless journey six years ago. So my background is mixed. It has experience from programming languages, compilers, hardware systems, and I've done a lot of things that I think have a common theme across verticals, or I build verticals that cross lots of different layers of the stack. Jeremy:  Awesome. All right, so I want to start with IBM and OpenWhisk because this fascinates me where, you know, six years ago and just recently, I mean, it was a six-year birthday of AWS Lambda and I think it's, that this sort of kicked off a massive sort of investment and maybe almost like a space race except for the cloud, I guess, a serverless race against all these different vendors. So, you were involved with this very, very early on, right? I mean, like I think it was your project, right? So I'd love to hear how this all came about, like, why did IBM suddenly say, “Okay, we need to build a serverless offering?”Rodric: Right. So, before I started working on OpenWhisk, I was doing something completely different, where I was debugging hardware and looking at how to generate hardware from software. And then we saw the Amazon Lambda announcement at the time and it was literally right around this time. And as soon as we saw it, it was sort of one of those moments where you just realize, “Oh, my God, this is a dramatic shift in technology that's coming.” And even though it was basically day zero you could see, you know from the right perspective, you could see what the future is. And now I say serverless is inevitable, because you know, whether you're on the bandwagon or not, you will be in the future because that's the only way developers will want to build. So, in the early days, you know, we saw the announcement we were looking at the project we were doing like they gave us the terminology that we were looking for. It was just take hold and just run it in the cloud and we were trying to do something like that with hardware, you know take software and now we can accelerate for you on an FPGA, which is reconfigurable hardware without you having to worry about compilation running. And so we were doing work in a similar context in a similar area but completely different context, when we saw it. It was like this is it. So we got together as a small team within IBM, six people, and we were having discussions about Lambda and the future. What did it mean for IBM Cloud? And you know from IBM Research our job really was to sort of look at technology that's on the horizon and you know, five, ten years in the future and start thinking about, what does that mean? And after about, you know, a few weeks of just talking about it, I got tired of talking about it and over a weekend I built the first version of what became Apache OpenWhisk.And it started with, you know, a command line tool which is the programming interface essentially to the cloud, allowed me to create functions, run them, get their logs, and recorded a short video by Sunday night and then sent it in, you know, Monday morning it got in front of the right eyes. You know that whole thing about being at the right place at the right time and it started circulating and from there, we're like, okay this is turning into something, and off we went. So it was sort of the Amazon Lambda landed on the scene. There was recognition that this is something really transformative into the future and then the will to just build something and once you start building something I think good things start to happen, you know, when you're surrounded by good people like we were at IBM. And the project root, I mean, we were three people, we launched the early version of OpenWhisk internally; it was called BlueWhisk, I think, at the time and, you know, I think within one year of when the first commit to the project started to an IBM announced at their big developer conference, it took us basically one year from commit to launch.And we launched out of IBM Research, which was, again, unheard of. And right around the time we launched, Google Cloud announced Functions, and I think Azure also announced Functions. So, we weren't the only ones, sort of, that saw that shift coming and everybody really started basically saying, “Oh yeah, there is an arms race here or space race.” And I was really excited because it sort of transformed what I've been doing and I think it's been really exciting and rewarding for me.Jeremy: So, I absolutely love this idea of these sort of ideation, like, these genesis meetings that happen in organizations where you're like, all right, there's this major transformational shift that's going on there. So, to the extent that you can and, again, I don't know if there were executives in there, who were in that meeting, you don't have to disclose that, but if you, to the extent that you can take me inside that meeting, what was the conversation. Was it like, “Oh, we just need to do this because we need to compete with Lambda,” or was it, “we need to compete with AWS,” or was it something where the structure of IBM Cloud realized that this truly needed to be done?Rodric: Right. So, it was a bit of the latter. And in fact, when we started coding we tried very carefully not to use the word “Lambda” anywhere, that was sort of just IBM bureaucracy that maybe was ingrained in us, but it was a bit of the latter. I mean, I remember the meeting very well. I remember who was in it. I remember where everybody was sitting because it was that kind of transformational meeting, at least for me, and as I saw it. And it was a recognition that, you know, if you wanted to move applications to the cloud or you wanted to transform an organization and become more, you know, what people call cloud native today, basically using the tools and technology in the cloud, you had to do something different and what we had been doing wasn't quite working. This whole shift on lift strategy doesn't quite transform your business and to do the value innov...