Kotless: a Serverless Framework for Kotlin

TL;DR

Kotless is a Kotlin framework that simplifies the development and deployment of serverless applications by automating cloud infrastructure integration, making serverless development more accessible and efficient.

Contribution

It introduces a cloud-agnostic toolkit that automates deployment code generation and infrastructure integration for Kotlin serverless applications.

Findings

Proven capability to develop production serverless applications

Automates deployment and infrastructure management

Reduces developer effort in serverless application deployment

Abstract

Recent trends in Web development demonstrate an increased interest in serverless applications, i.e. applications that utilize computational resources provided by cloud services on demand instead of requiring traditional server management. This approach enables better resource management while being scalable, reliable, and cost-effective. However, it comes with a number of organizational and technical difficulties which stem from the interaction between the application and the cloud infrastructure, for example, having to set up a recurring task of reuploading updated files. In this paper, we present Kotless - a Kotlin Serverless Framework. Kotless is a cloud-agnostic toolkit that solves these problems by interweaving the deployed application into the cloud infrastructure and automatically generating the necessary deployment code. This relieves developers from having to spend their time integrating and managing their applications instead of developing them. Kotless has proven its capabilities and has been used to develop several serverless applications already in production. Its source code is available at https://github.com/JetBrains/kotless, a tool demo can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMSakPNl3TY