Ray, Knative, and Running Serverless Workloads in the Cloud

Serverless computing is a development model that lets developers build and run applications without having to manage servers. Two popular open source frameworks for running serverless workloads are Ray Serve and Knative Serving. Each framework takes a slightly different approach to serverless: Ray focuses primarily on serving machine learning models, whereas Knative focuses on building automatic HTTP services more generally. But despite these differences, there are many opportunities for both communities to learn from one another, which this talk will highlight.

Drawing on experience participating in both communities and building open technologies using both frameworks, this talk compares and contrasts the different approaches that Ray and Knative take to serverless. We also uncover best practices and lessons learned for serverless development as well as potential pitfalls and difficulties that serverless users should be aware of. Furthermore, we highlight key pillars for the next generation of serverless applications, including possible areas of collaboration between the Ray and Knative communities.