Wednesday, September 11, 2019, at 1 pm Eastern/10 am Pacific
Abstract: Linux container technologies such as Docker have made it easier than ever to package and move applications from one computing environment to another. In the last five or so years, a new cloud computing model called “Functions-as-a-Service” (FaaS) has started to gain traction for the way it can reduce the maintenance associated with deploying and scaling application components. In this webinar, we will discuss the primary concepts of FaaS and introduce the Abaco API platform, hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Abaco (Actor Based Containers) is an NSF-funded project to provide a Functions-as-a-Service platform based on Docker containers and the Actor Model of Concurrent Computation to researchers. After an introduction, we’ll walk through an example of packaging, deploying, and scaling a Tensorflow image classifier on the Abaco cloud. Some prior familiarity with Docker and HTTP/Rest APIs would be helpful, though not strictly required.