Serverless Ops

Chapter 2. The Ecosystem

In this chapter we will explore the current serverless computing offerings and the wider ecosystem. We’ll also try to determine whether serverless computing only makes sense in the context of a public cloud setting or if operating and/or rolling out a serverless offering on-premises also makes sense.

Overview

Many of the serverless offerings at the time of writing of this report (mid-2016) are rather new, and the space is growing quickly.

Table 2-1 gives a brief comparison of the main players. More detailed breakdowns are provided in the following sections.

Table 2-1. Serverless offerings by company

Offering	Cloud offering	On-premises	Launched	Environments
AWS Lambda	Yes	No	2014	Node.js, Python, Java
Azure Functions	Yes	Yes	2016	C#, Node.js, Python, F#, PHP, Java
Google Cloud Functions	Yes	No	2016	JavaScript
iron.io	No	Yes	2012	Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, Node.js, Go, .NET
Galactic Fog’s Gestalt	No	Yes	2016	Java, Scala, JavaScript, .NET
IBM OpenWhisk	Yes	Yes	2014	Node.js, Swift

Note that by cloud offering, I mean that there’s a managed offering in one of the public clouds available, typically with a pay-as-you-go model attached.

AWS Lambda

Introduced in 2014 in an AWS re:Invent keynote, AWS Lambda is the incumbent in the serverless space and makes up an ecosystem in its own right, including frameworks and tooling on top of it, built by folks outside of Amazon. Interestingly, the motivation to introduce Lambda originated in observations ...