"an open source cloud platform" is probably an overstatement.
It's what OpenStack has been - "opensource cloud platform".
But yes, I agree, overstatement for OpenWhisk.
Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform
141–146 of 146 posts
Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform
#142Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform
#143If you're run k8s on your infrastructure there's a pretty slick alternative called Open FaaS: https://github.com/openfaas/faas
To be fair with other solid "on-top-of-K8S" frameworks:
- Fission by Platform 5 https://platform9.com/fission
- Kubeless http://kubeless.io/
- Nuclio by https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio
Not to mention few newer ones (there are over 30 serverless frameworks for any taste and size).
Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consolidation. There are way too many frameworks right now and they offer nothing different, especially for something so commodity as packaging and running a single function. The major cloud vendors are also rapidly evolving with Azure Functions being the most integrated and useful with AWS second and GCP far behind. The next few years will see 1-2 open-source frameworks along with all the cloud vendors getting to pa…
>The major cloud vendors are also rapidly evolving with Azure Functions being the most integrated and useful with AWS second and GCP far behind. Can you expand on this, please? I've got a very basic understanding of the first two, would like to know more.
Azure has the best "serverless" functions platform out of the major cloud providers right now. Easier deployment process and triggers to activate a function outnumber the other vendors. The new Event Grid service allows connecting them to pretty much anything, especially when used with the Logic Apps service.
AWS Lambda is decent and has features like Lambda@Edge which runs on CDN nodes and can do processing on each request.
Google Cloud Functions are basic and only support javascript with http, pub/sub and storage triggers without any integrations beyond that or into the rest of the platform.
Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pure CGI applications (before the mod_x / long-running workers strategy took over) are "stateless" / "function as a service" insofar as the application's internal state can only live for one request lifecycle. However, they generally ran with the external state (ex. local filesystem) preserved between requests, so the approach was still often a bit different than it is for modern FaaS applications, where state can on…
Is something like mod_php what you'd consider a CGI application? I always think of CGIs from before the day when webservers made it easy to integrate a runtime. For me, CGIs were usually binary executables that the webserver handed data to. I always thought it was about the data exchange, instead of about application state, because http requests are by default generically stateless.
To me it's about the application lifecycle, so no, I wouldn't consider mod_php CGI (which is why I specifically called it out in my parent comment).
CGI does the same thing Lambda does: it binds the application lifecycle to the request lifecycle. HTTP requests to an application server that runs across multiple requests are not stateless, they're inherently bound to the server's internal process state. If the server is well-written this shouldn't matter, but the entire reason an application has to be refactored at all to become a Lambda is that this is not usually the case. Most modern application-server style web apps are loaded with mutable global state that lives through many requests - from thread / connection pools to global caches to updatable configuration stores to even dynamically loaded code/modules.
Re: Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform
#146So 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.
Yeah. PHP may be out of fashion, but it's still powering a massive portion of the internet because this deployment model is so lightweight. Much different than the now-popular model of "spin up an app server and reverse proxy to it".