Scale By The Bay 2020: Mary Grygleski, Deploying a Modern Serverless Reactive Container to the Cloud

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference We have been hearing a lot about the benefits of using the reactive approach to solving concurrency problems in distributed systems. While reactive programming refers to the implementation techniques being used on the coding level, on the systems deployment and runtime level, we can leverage on a robust yet very flexible and lightweight framework such as Vert.x to deliver. In this session, we will first learn about what the missions of a reactive system are, which, among many things, include handling multiple concurrent data stream flows and being able to control back pressure as well as managing errors in an elegant manner. We will also discuss the special polyglot nature of Vert.x, its event loop, and its use of the Vertical model. Live coding will accompany this session to illustrate how to program a simple use case using multiple JVM languages such as Java and Kotlin, and then we will build and dockerize it to be deployed as a serverless container leveraging Knative to a Kubernetes cluster in a delightful manner. With all of the excitement in the cloud native world, and buzz words like reactive systems, event-driven, serverless apps, containers, clusters etc. flying around, this talk will give a very concise introduction to what each of these terms mean, and how they can be strung together to illustrate an end-to-end reactive application from implementation, compilation, containerization, all the way to it being deployed onto the cloud. Participants will learn some important concepts about event-driven and reac…