Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

openwhisk.apache.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 146 posts

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#21

Post by lima »

alexellisuk wrote: post #16

Probably a good time to mention the CNCF Serverless Workgroup and the Serverless landscape. It lists all the Kubernetes-native Serverless frameworks as well as the proprietary ones. OpenWhisk was one of the first projects in this space and is written entirely in Scala. Good to see a Kubernetes integration emerging. https://medium.com/memory-leak/serverless-cloud-native-lands... Other notable projects: Oracle's Fn, Bi…

Red Hat is participating as well:

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/06/07/red-hat-and-ap...

They're really invested in Kubernetes with their open source OpenShift PaaS.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#22

Post by alexellisuk »

andybak wrote: post #19

So serverless is essentially a return to the PHP/CGI execution model... What's changed to turn a bad idea into a good idea again?

It's less of CGI (some projects only support that) Think of it like FastCGI where most of the issues with CGI are fixed up (i.e. throughput isn't an issue) and then combine that with containerisation features from Kubernetes etc to make packaging easier (again not all projects use a Docker image format).

If you're wondering whether Serverless is catching on then see also: AWS Lambda.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#23

Post by zokier »

jacques_chester wrote: post #11
amelius wrote: post #5

Since it's serverless, I assume it runs on the client. How does it scale then? And is the client really the right place to run these functions, in view of performance, and perhaps battery use?

"Serverless" is a marketing term invented by Amazon for what might in retrospect have been better described as mini-PaaS. It doesn't literally mean "without servers". It means that the developer doesn't care about them. AWS have energetically pushed the line that in The One True and Holy Definition of Serverless operators don't care either. Which, gee whiz, what a coincidence, distinguishes Lambda from opensource pro…

> "Serverless" is a marketing term invented by Amazon for what might in retrospect have been better described as mini-PaaS.

Almost. Imho "serverless" describes more the architecture of applications, in contrast to "mini-PaaS" which would then describe the platform on which such applications are deployed.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#25

Post by jacques_chester »

zokier wrote: post #23
jacques_chester wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Serverless" is a marketing term invented by Amazon for what might in retrospect have been better described as mini-PaaS. It doesn't literally mean "without servers". It means that the developer doesn't care about them. AWS have energetically pushed the line that in The One True and Holy Definition of Serverless operators don't care either. Which, gee whiz, what a coincidence, distinguishes Lambda from opensource pro…

> "Serverless" is a marketing term invented by Amazon for what might in retrospect have been better described as mini-PaaS. Almost. Imho "serverless" describes more the architecture of applications, in contrast to "mini-PaaS" which would then describe the platform on which such applications are deployed.

What about the architecture is different, in your view?

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#26

Post by rabbah »

faizshah wrote: post #2

If anyone else was wondering, this seems to originate from IBM in collaboration with Adobe. More information on the architecture here: https://thenewstack.io/behind-scenes-apache-openwhisk-server...

OpenWhisk started entirely from IBM Research. It was open sourced in Feb 2016. Adobe came on board as part of the induction to Apache Incubator.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#27

Post by paulgb »

andybak wrote: post #19

So serverless is essentially a return to the PHP/CGI execution model... What's changed to turn a bad idea into a good idea again?

Was it ever a bad idea, or did it just go out of fashion? I'm not a PHP fan, but I miss the simplicity of low-end deployments on a LAMP stack by literally dragging files over FTP. It seems like something has been lost with the total embrace of more modern web frameworks.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#28

Post by rabbah »

aisofteng wrote: post #15
faizshah wrote: post #2

If anyone else was wondering, this seems to originate from IBM in collaboration with Adobe. More information on the architecture here: https://thenewstack.io/behind-scenes-apache-openwhisk-server...

OpenWhisk is what runs IBM Cloud Functions: https://console.bluemix.net/openwhisk/

Also Adobe I/O runtime https://www.adobe.io/apis/cloudplatform/runtime.html.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#29

Post by dominotw »

amelius wrote: post #5

Since it's serverless, I assume it runs on the client. How does it scale then? And is the client really the right place to run these functions, in view of performance, and perhaps battery use?

not sure if trolling or a honest question.

Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

#30

Post by rabbah »

friendly_chap wrote: post #7
goliatone wrote: post #4

I have been interested in running a serverless setup for a while now, so I’ve been looking at different open source alternatives to AWS lambda. I considered OpenWhisk but felt IronFunctions would be quicker to setup and easier to run. Anyone has experience deploying/using both? Would anyone that is running OpenWhisk comment on the process to get it running?

Self plug but https://github.com/1backend/1backend literally needs just 4 docker containers to run. They are in the ReadMe, let me know what you think of it. It contains a bunch of unique features, so it's not your typical serverless platform, but the core is the same if you don't want to go crazy with the web framework like features.

It's great to see so many functions platform - in some ways it shows there's increasing interest, awareness, and adoption. The field is still quite young and there will be a lot of experimentation and exploration.

There's also a difference between deploying rapidly for local development (less is better) and actually running a functions platform at scale. AWS lambda reportedly handles over 2B lambdas a day (this was a year ago).

Not every platform needs that kind of scale, but it does put things in perspectives.

Post reply on HN