Lingxian Kong and Feilong Wang are senior cloud engineers from the Catalyst Cloud(external link) and long-term contributors to OpenStack(external link). At the 2017 OpenStack Summit in Sydney, they announced the Qinling project. Qinling enables customers to run functions (or serverless computing) in OpenStack clouds, similar to AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions.
Live Demonstration
The service was demonstrated live using two common use cases:
- Running functions that resize images as they are uploaded to an object storage container.
- Monitoring a web application and sending an SMS notification when it is down.
Integration with OpenStack Services
Qinling integrates with the alarm service in OpenStack (Aodh), so that it can trigger functions based on events from other services. It also integrates with the messaging and notification service (Zaqar), allowing functions to be triggered by messages or using messages to support the communication between functions. The notification service in Zaqar also allows functions to easily send email or SMS notifications.
Backend Support and Runtime Environments
On the backend side, Qinling supports multiple container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. In terms of runtime environments, a sample Python runtime environment is already available and Node.js is expected to be supported next.
Community Reception and Collaboration
The presentation was well received by the community and sparked a lot of interest in collaboration among vendors, particularly from other public cloud providers. Lingxian is now focusing on onboarding contributors from the community and preparing for a stable release in OpenStack Queens.
Future Developments and Customer Impact
The Catalyst Cloud team is excited about the possibilities that Qinling and Zaqar will bring to our customers. Our research and development team is working hard to bring these advancements to our public cloud, ready to be consumed by enterprise customers.
Additional Resources
The OpenStack Summit presentation has been recorded and can be seen below. Scott Lowe also published a summary of the presentation on his tech blog.(external link)