Lightbend Podcast: Cloudstate - Leveraging Distributed State for Serverless

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In this episode, we sit down with Lightbend Field CTO and Cloud Advocate, Sean Walsh, to discuss the developments in Cloudstate, Lightbend’s open source tool for distributed state management. Listen to the full recording to learn how:

Cloudstate gets to the heart of the matter. Creating and maintaining cloud applications that are decoupled, resilient, and scalable is difficult and expensive. Industry leaders are focused on trying to build the same type of cloud, but they are only addressing the infrastructure side (i.e. managing Docker, Kubernetes, etc). This is only half the battle–the other half is a cloud-ready platform with proven patterns for building cloud applications. Without that, problems can easily compound for your development team.

Cloudstate gets distributed state right. One critical challenge that Cloudstate addresses is managing application state in the cloud. As we’ve seen, realtime reliance on the database must be removed to allow the serverless tier fully perform its functions. It’s not possible to make serverless guarantees if we pass in the entire database to instantiate a function or allow unbridled reads from those functions. Cloudstate brings application state into the serverless function itself, removing the need for constant DB roundtrips.

Cloudstate is open source and polyglot. Cloudstate is open source and built on top of best of breed technologies like Akka, GraalVM, and Kubernetes–harnessing all their power while removing their complexity–with polyglot support for JavaScript, Java, Go, Kotlin, and Dart, with work already being done to integrate .NET, Spring, Swift, Python, Scala, Rust, and others.

Cloudstate is familiar to developers. Cloudstate presents functionality in ways most comfortable for developers, letting them push applications to Cloudstate using Lightbend’s simple user interfaces, or integrate our CLI into your build chain. Your developers solve business problems in their language of choice, leaving the heavy lifting to Lightbend and Cloudstate.

Cloudstate delivers concrete benefits. With Cloudstate, you only pay for infrastructure resources that you use, not for extra capacity. This means orders of magnitude less spending on hardware and compute resources. Cloudstate also lets you be more productive with less developers per project, which means more projects! By taking over the heaving lifting for operational concerns, you also benefit from less DevOps expense, and avoid the “full stack” fallacy. Ultimately, you can focus more on the business requirements, rather than YAML and configuration.

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If this sounds interesting, you can learn more about Cloudstate, and register your interest to participate in the Cloudstate Preview:

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