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

11–20 of 146 posts

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

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

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 projects like this.

Disclosure: I work on a FaaS, Project Riff, for Pivotal. So I guess we're kinda competing with AWS? -ish?

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

#14

Post by thomasj »

jacques_chester wrote: post #8
retr0grad3 wrote: post #6

If you're run k8s on your infrastructure there's a pretty slick alternative called Open FaaS: https://github.com/openfaas/faas

There are a number of alternatives targeting Kubernetes. I work on one - Project Riff. Others I've peeked at are Kubeless, Fission and Fn. Some are pure k8s systems (like Riff) and others like OpenFaaS aim to be portable across orchestrators. I believe OpenWhisk is being steered towards running on Kubernetes at some point, but I am not qualified to say. When we looked at it last year as part of the research which led…

OpenWhisk supports Kubernetes as a "first-class" deployment platform. Red Hat have been doing lots of work on this since adopting the project (https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/06/07/red-hat-and-ap...).

See here for more details: https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk-deploy-kube

(Disclosure: I'm a committer on Apache OpenWhisk).

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

#15

Post by aisofteng »

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/

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

#16

Post by alexellisuk »

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, Bitnami's Kubeless, Platform 9's Fission, Iguazio's Nuclio and OpenFaaS (community project). (there are more)

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

#17

Post by antoncohen »

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?

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/

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

#18

Post by alexellisuk »

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?

Take a look at the other options I posted. IronFunctions runs one container per request so you'd need to evaluate if that's fast enough for your purposes. They have a new "hot" mode too but I'm not sure how far they are with supporting that.. maybe Chad could comment if he's around.

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

#20

Post by thomasj »

polskibus wrote: post #3

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 to come built-in. Custom images can be used to add large libraries or other resources. - Integrated API Gateway. Makes it simple to expose custom routes to functions. - Multiple built-in event sources including HTTP events, CouchDB, Kafka and more. Platform supports registering custom event providers to add any external data feed or event source. - Higher-order function composition patterns including sequences.

There are numerous open-source serverless platforms but OpenWhisk is the most mature and one of the only open-source platforms powering commercial serverless offerings, being used by IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe and Red Hat. It has used by IBM's offering with customers since early 2016.

Development is all public with the project being in the Apache incubation phase. Upcoming features being worked on include Swift 4 support, on-going k8s integration and better higher-order functional composition patterns. Check out the Github PRs and issues for details.

(Disclosure: OpenWhisk committer and IBMer).

Post reply on HN