iTech Talk – Cloud‑Native Serverless Practice at iQIYI

On the afternoon of April 10, iQIYI's technology product team hosted an offline technical salon titled “Exploring and Practicing Cloud‑Native Implementation”. Experts from Kuaishou, Baidu and ByteDance were invited to share and discuss practical experiences of cloud‑native deployment.

The session began with a presentation by iQIYI technical expert Shang Liuyan on the company’s private‑cloud Serverless practice. The talk highlighted three key words: Serverless, private cloud, and practical implementation.

The first part explained the concept of Serverless, addressing the common question “Is Serverless the same as FaaS?”. Wikipedia’s definitions in Chinese and English were cited, noting that Serverless includes both Runtime and Database services, while FaaS is a subset belonging to the Runtime category.

The second part compared Serverless offerings on public clouds (AWS, Alibaba Cloud) with those on private clouds, emphasizing that public‑cloud Serverless services are divided into compute, integration, and data layers, whereas Alibaba Cloud’s offerings are less granular.

The third part described iQIYI’s concrete strategies and experiences. In 2018, iQIYI started building Serverless by first deploying an FaaS platform. At that time, mature open‑source options were limited; the team evaluated Knative, OpenFaaS, and ultimately chose the Oracle‑open‑source Fn project because of Oracle’s enterprise reputation and better support for the Mesos orchestration platform used internally.

Using Fn, iQIYI built an MVP image‑resize service, a classic FaaS use case that demonstrates stateless function execution and pay‑per‑invocation benefits. However, attempts to apply public‑cloud promotion models to private cloud revealed two major obstacles: (1) FaaS could not handle complex functions in 2018, and (2) pay‑as‑you‑go pricing does not fit private‑cloud economics.

The discussion then turned to whether private clouds truly need Serverless. The conclusion was that private‑cloud Serverless should focus on connecting internal, non‑replaceable services and enabling event‑driven architectures rather than mimicking public‑cloud offerings.

To address workflow orchestration, iQIYI developed “Airworkflow”, a Serverless workflow engine built on CNCF’s Workflow standard, Knative Serving, and Eventing. Airworkflow automatically generates observability tags from the state‑machine definition, simplifying monitoring and debugging.

Airworkflow also introduces a business‑event concept, distinguishing private‑cloud events (e.g., order creation, payment success) from generic message‑queue entries. A dashboard was built to visualize events, state transitions, and logs.

Challenges in adoption were noted: internal teams often require hands‑on demos and step‑by‑step guidance, leading to long integration cycles. To reduce friction, iQIYI plans to launch a Dev App Store that packages events and functions as internal open‑source products, encouraging a self‑service ecosystem.

The session concluded with a Q&A, where the audience asked about future support for stateful functions. The answer emphasized that stateful services are better built as microservices and connected via Airworkflow.