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Apache OpenWhisk – A serverless, open-source cloud platform

openwhisk.apache.org

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

#41

Post by qmarchi »

masukomi wrote: post #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?

The goal of the project is to give an Operations Team the ability to not have to manage the platform and software stacks being utilized and to give developers the luxury of not worrying on how to scale their application so long as they follow some basic constraints.

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

#43

Post by thomasj »

jacques_chester wrote: post #33
thomasj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Docker extensibility is common in the open-source faas projects but not in any(?) of the commercial serverless offerings (Google, Amazon or Microsoft).

Runtime support (upload code not a container) is more common in the commercial offerings that most of the Docker-based faas frameworks, which use a container as the packaging.

OpenWhisk is more flexible than most of the platforms with respect to packaging IMO (Wanna deploy code? Great. Prefer containers? Sure. Wanna use code and a custom image? No problem!)

Event support is more common in the commercial offerings (as they have cloud services for you to use), whereas the "faas" framework seem more bare bones. You'll have to configure event integration manually. Same goes for API gateways.

OpenWhisk supports numerous open-source event providers with a extensible API for integrating new providers. This is more complete that lots of the other projects in this respect.

Over time these features will become default in all projects but there does seem a split in focus between the commercial offerings and "faas" frameworks at the moment. I'm biased :) but I think OpenWhisk has a comparible feature set to Lambda (having been around for over two years) whilst still benefiting from the open-source docker story.

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

#44

Post by cnj »

masukomi wrote: post #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?

This is open source, so "someone" has to run it.

This someone could be e.g. IBM or RedHat, it could also be someone like Adobe that wants to offer a FaaS integrated into their main product.

It could also be your own company, e.g. you could have an infrastructure team that provides it for all other teams.

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

#45

Post by friendly_chap »

rabbah wrote: post #30
friendly_chap wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi there!

Thanks for the encouragement. To be fair we at 1backend don't consider the field that new at all. It's just the old PaaS concept with some twists and reworded marketing!

I personally spent years building microservices platforms at various places and after years of not implementing my insights I decided now the time is right and people might adopt it given the current hype cycle =)

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

#46

Post by unethical_ban »

dominotw wrote: post #29
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.

Serverless is an annoying buzzword term that actively confuses those who don't know the architecture. What is it, really? (someone else tried to explain above). What does if offer? What is an example use case or business/research function deployed on "serverless" services?

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

#47

Post by nine_k »

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?

A complete machine instance is too coarse a grain sometmies. So the progression is: "A physical box" → "A VM with many things running" → "A half-OS and a couple of related processes in a container" → "A single OS-process-like function invoked on demand".

The upside is that you invoke the "functions" not as processes on one box you have to maintain (*CGI), but on many boxes maintained automatically. Your limiting resource is not the limitations of the box, but only your budget. Also, stuff like security, software updates, load balancing, etc is taken care of by the provider.

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

#48

Post by nine_k »

masukomi wrote: post #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?

Think of it as of some sort of a cluster.

On a single machine, you can run processes ("invoke functions") locally. On a cluster, you can run a process, and it will start somewhere, on one of the less-loaded boxes.

With "serverless", the cluster is the cloud (a datacenter). You do not have to maintain it, but you can specify the code to run, and it will run, as many copies of it simultaneously as needed (thousands or zero), and you are only billed for the resources you consumed. It's ultimate elasticity for non-interactive load.

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

#49

Post by anewhnaccount2 »

alexellisuk wrote: post #22
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.

But isn't "serverless" fundamentally a restart-the-world model, which would make it more like CGI than FastCGI which is a application server type model which isn't fundamentally that different to putting a reverse proxy in front of a HTTP speaking application server?

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

#50

Post by rabbah »

friendly_chap wrote: post #45
rabbah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi there! Thanks for the encouragement. To be fair we at 1backend don't consider the field that new at all. It's just the old PaaS concept with some twists and reworded marketing! I personally spent years building microservices platforms at various places and after years of not implementing my insights I decided now the time is right and people might adopt it given the current hype cycle =)

Kudos.

I'd agree, old ideas, new contexts. The twists matter.

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