Stateful Serverless and the Elephant in the Room
Explore the concept of Stateful Serverless and its implications in this 40-minute conference talk by Stephan Ewen from Ververica. Dive into the challenges of handling state in serverless applications and discover how Stateful Functions, a new pattern utilizing containerized, event-driven functions with Apache Flink, addresses issues of data consistency and complex failure semantics. Learn about the distributed snapshot model, stateless functions, deployment strategies, and practical applications through a billing example. Gain insights into the Stateful Functions project, its differentiation from Cloud State, and its potential for multi-tenancy scenarios. Examine the migration process to Stateful Functions, compare it with other solutions, and understand its impact on memory consumption and synchronous communication in serverless architectures.