What Kalix Platform-as-a-Service promises is tremendous – a way to write cloud applications based on Kubernetes under a unified API that abstracts the lower layers.
We know that Kubernetes is magical, but at the same time hard – hard to set up, hard to configure, hard to use, hard to write applications, and this difficulty is one reason why many are reluctant to let go of their monolith in the microservices world:
“The complexity in the cloud ecosystem is slowing development and development teams,” said Jonas Bonér, founder and CEO of Lightbend. “Kubernetes does a great job of managing, orchestrating, and ensuring the availability and scalability of containers, but that’s only half the story.
“There needs to be an equal investment in the application layer to make it easier for the developer to build complete applications that take full advantage of the excellent underlying cloud infrastructure that is available to us. Kalix is the solution to this critical problem.”
With the current state of cloud infrastructure, application developers are also burdened with management
- local and distributed application data with consistency and integrity
- local and distributed workflow, communication and coordination
- Customer context and communication
- Maintaining business rules and operational semantics of the application as a whole
- Ensuring intelligent and adaptive co-location of data, computing power and end users
- Integration with other systems
In response, Kalix combines a database-less API-first programming model with a serverless runtime so developers can focus on their business. It allows them to create the data objects that make sense for their service without having to know how that data is needed to be persisted, while the services built under Kalix can contain both stateful and stateless components.
The main benefit here is the zero-ops experience; no need to set up databases, configure service meshes, or tune caching layers. No worries about the underlying infrastructure including databases, message brokers, caches, service meshes and API gateways. All features are provided out of the box and are transparent to the developer.
As such, Kalix frees and enables developers to leverage the skills they already have to build mission-critical, stateful applications on a serverless architecture that includes advanced data access patterns like event sourcing, CQRS, and CRDTs, without having to learn how to use them implemented. All you have to do is choose a state model and let Kalix do the data management to build your stateful serverless service. Then use one of the language SDKs available, including Java, Scala, and JavaScript.
The features of Kalix at a glance:
- Multiple database types
Choose between Key/Value, Event Sourcing
and conflict-free replicated data types
(CRDT’s). But no need for DB spin-up, SQL
Schema definitions or other DB management
and maintenance. - No infrastructure required
No need to set up databases, configure services
Meshes, tune caching layers. Everything available
out-of-the-box and transparent to the developer. - Open communication protocols
HTTP/gRPC/Pubsub/Kafka for
Ingress/Egress/Communication between services
and data exchange/messaging. Eliminated
Cross-team confusion and frustration and enables
best tool for the job. - Dev Tools integrations including IDE,
CI/CD and logging
Use preferred editors like Visual Studio Code for
Development and improvement of DevOps processes
with integrations in CI/CD pipelines - security
Data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Integrated authentication support (JWT). - 0ms cold starts
Either work with us for pre-provisioned capacity or
Use the default configuration and still get starts from 0ms
for your services.
Kalix is cross-platform and there are binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Setup is easy, let’s take Linux for example:
- Download and install the latest version of kalix
curl -sL https://docs.kalix.io/install-cli.sh | bash - Verify that the Kalix CLI was installed successfully by running the following to list all available commands:
calix help - Sign up for a Kalix account
kalix auth login
Then select your preferred language. From this point on, it’s best to work with the publicly available examples, which abound. Take Java for example:
By signing up for a free trial, you can research and try yourself first to see if it fits your needs, and later scale up as you please on the pay-as-you-go model.
Kalix addresses a hot topic, hot because it’s preventing many from adopting cloud infrastructure, and it was about time someone thought about it and did something about it. Maybe it’s time to look at the cloud from a different angle, the Kalix angle?
More information
Kalix.io
JVM SDK
Kalix documentation
On the subject of matching items
The Nanodegree cloud-native application architecture fundamentals
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