All application developers would like to wave a wand and make infrastructure disappear. The latest technologies — cloud, serverless computing, etc. — have fans largely because they push some compute, storage and networking hassles off their plates. Will they finally get us to app-only development?

“We’re awfully close to having a model where we’ve got clean separation between the application layer and the system,” said Jason McGee (pictured), IBM fellow and vice president and chief technology officer of the IBM Cloud Platform at IBM. “I think with containers [a virtualized method for running distributed applications], we’re as close as we’ve ever been.”

That said, containers have not provided the clean divorce from resources that fill developers’ dreams. Compute, storage, networking abstractions — those elements are still there.

“What you want is for certain workloads to not worry about any of that,” McGee said. Functions and twelve-factor systems for building apps could wave it all away, he added.

McGee spoke with sJohn Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed containers, functions, and the ongoing search for app-only development. (* Disclosure below.)

Kubernetes-serverless-function conjunction

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and all involved in Kubernetes (the open-source container orchestrator) have reached a pivot, McGee pointed out. “I think what’s happening now is, well, what about stateless twelve-factor apps? What about functions? What about the rest of the stack? And how do we all come together as a community to find that going forward?” he asked.

The open-source Knative project from Google LLC is a great example of Kubernetes and serverless meeting.

Developers cannot force just any workload into functions or a twelve-factor paradigm. Cloud Foundry Inc. has a particularly opinionated view of twelve-factor stateless apps, according to McGee. Functions are also “opinionated” about event-oriented apps. Certain abstractions have to be consistent with the rest of the platform.

But for the apps that fit, those methodologies can get rid of all the resource-provisioning fuss once and for all, McGee concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE