Embracing stateful client-server communication in the era of serverless functions

Description

Using a real-world online application (a real-time whiteboard) as an example, Wenbo Zhu illustrates the key architectural properties and underlying technologies to create and deploy a real-time, stateful application on top of the completely stateless serverless architecture. You’ll discover why it’s both feasible and desirable to keep the client-side programming model stateful while at the same time leveraging the stateless/serverless model to deploy the entire server-side stack. That is, there will be no stateful component to deploy on the server side. Moreover, the network communication between the client and server is serverless friendly too, in terms of load balancing, DoS prevention, and failure recovery. And you don’t even have to sacrifice any latency to achieve the best of both worlds (i.e., an architecture that is stateful to the application but stateless to the underlying cloud and serverless infrastructure).