In this book, we introduced serverless, the FaaS platforms, and how Docker is relevant to this technology. We learned together about how to set up Docker Swarm clusters on production.

The book discussed three well-known FaaS platforms, which are OpenFaaS, OpenWhisk, and the Fn Project. OpenFaaS uses the Swarm-based orchestrator, while OpenWhisk and Fn used their own scheduling techniques on plain Docker.

Then, we demonstrated a project in Chapter 8, Putting Them All Together, to present how we can link all of these three platforms together, by running them on the same network of a Docker cluster. The project was demonstrated on how we could invoke the services of other FaaS platforms. Functions written in several programming languages were presented including Java, Go, and JavaScript (Node.js).

We used Java to write a simple function. For modern programming models, we could use the RxJava library to help writing Java programs in the reactive style, which fit very nicely for the event-driven programming.

With JavaScript, we wrote a Chrome-based scripting to connect through. We also deployed a blockchain to demonstrate that it works nicely with the FaaS computing model.

In the following sections, we will discuss some advanced, experimental topics that go deeply or beyond the current scope of serverless and FaaS. However, some of them may be going to be mainstream in the near future.