Live data from Hacker News

Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

openwhisk.apache.org

31–40 of 146 posts

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

#31
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?

- Scaling infrastructure up and down is hard to get right.

- Paying for idle servers can get costly if you have many of them.

- Idling servers are inefficient for cloud providers as well.

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

#32

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?

You might be interested in [Oracle's] Fn Project, it is open source and created by the team behind IronFunctions. I think it started life as a fork of IronFunctions. It is written in Go. http://fnproject.io/

Indeed, the original founders of Iron.io are at Oracle. They are up to some good stuff. See https://medium.com/fnproject/8-reasons-why-we-built-the-fn-p...

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

#33
post #20

Excellent, more competition in serverless means increased adoption. Even better if it is open source, in contrast to GOOG/AMZN/MSFT offerings! Seems like an undercutting attempt on the IBM side? Could someone with production-level serverless experience share his insights on OpenWhisk capabilities and roadmap? What's missing from the G/A/M stacks?

Apache OpenWhisk has a number of differences to other serverless platforms (as well as being open-source) including... - Excellent "out of the box" runtime support including Node.js, Java, PHP, Swift, Python, any binary runtime (Go, Rust, etc..). - Custom runtime support using Docker images. Allowing custom images as the execution environment makes it easy to use (almost) anytime on the platform without needing this…

I'd point out that supporting languages "out of the box" and having extensibility via docker images is more or less table stakes at this point.

A lot of the other things you listed are present in other FaaSes too in varying degrees.

No questioning that OpenWhisk was the first major opensource project in this space, though.

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

#34
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 means that the server is abstract it away from you, you just have scripts that run and if it needs to run grow to more servers it will do by itself

An emerging market for functions is also in IoT and edge use cases. See https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/ if interested.

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

#35
post #21

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.

You can except more commitment to Kube from OpenWhisk.

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

#38
Can someone explain to me WHERE the servers exist for this "serverless" platform? Is this code i run on lamda and lamda competitors? Is apache hosting it? Do i have to set up my own servers to run the code?

All the intro docs and FAQs seem to assume that "serverless" is literally no servers, just magical cloud fairies or something.

I get that it uses docker containers, but where can i / am i expected to run those?

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

#39

Is there something to bridge the gap between serverful and serverless? Is there a good enough framework that lets me write Rails-like code and have it compile into a bunch of serverless jobs?

I don't know about rails, but there's a good Flask -> Lambda project called Zappa https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa

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

#40

Is there something to bridge the gap between serverful and serverless? Is there a good enough framework that lets me write Rails-like code and have it compile into a bunch of serverless jobs?

I don't know about rails, but there's a good Flask -> Lambda project called Zappa https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa

Close enough -- I'll look into it, thanks!
Post reply on HN