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Building and Running Your Own Serverless Apps on Jenkins X

I previously wrote about serverless apps (web apps, specifically) hosted on AWS Lambda versus Knative. Just to rehash in terms so simple, it is kind of embarrassing: A serverless web app is a web app that scales down to zero when no one is using it (i.e. you only pay for what you use).

In this post, I want to show you how, in a few commands, you can get this running with Jenkins X on Google Compute. The benefit is that you can boast to all your friends that you know serverless and they don't. This will be powered by Knative and something called Gloo under the covers (you don't need to know the details, but I will provide some links later).

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Serverless Web Apps With Knative Compared to AWS Lambda

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn and has been updated since.

It’s hard to not be overwhelmed with the hype around serverless; the term seems to be constantly redefined to mean almost anything. I wanted to look at how easy it would be to do a serverless web app (which is to say: an app that responds to HTTP requests and does some work, and when there isn’t work to be done, scales down to zero cost).

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Getting Webhooks Behind That Firewall of Yours

In this post, I'll show you how to receive webhooks in real time from GitHub.com, even if your CloudBees Core stuff is behind a firewall. You can generalize this to other services too — such as BitBucket or DockerHub, or anything really that emits webhooks, but the instructions will be for GitHub projects hosted on github.com. The benefit, of course, is that you can use these public hosted services if you like, but your Core instances do not necessarily have to be directly open to the internet.

What Are Webhooks?

Just a very quick refresher on what webhooks are: Messages (often JSON, but not always) typically posted by HTTP(S) from a server to a client that is listening for events.

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Developers Eat Everything in a DevOps World

No doubt you have heard that software is eating the world and possibly even that developers are the new kingmakers. If all this is true, then there is a lot of responsibility that now rests with developers (for people practicing DevOps, this is also self-evident). Even before the rise of DevOps, developers were effectively entrusted with a lot of responsibility for the success of the business. Millions of dollars, or in some cases even lives, could be at stake.

Surely you have heard that with great power comes great responsibility? The flip side of this “new kingmaker” capability is that now (a lot) more is expected of developers.