Open Source Serverless Frameworks on Docker EE

Since the advent of AWS Lambda in 2014, the Function as a Service (FaaS) programming paradigm has gained a lot of traction in the cloud community. At first, only large cloud providers such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions or Azure Functions provided such services with a pay-per-invocation model, but since then interest has increased for developers and entreprises to build their own solutions on an open source model.

The maturation of container platforms such as Docker EE has made this process even easier, resulting in a number of competing frameworks in this space. We have identified at least 9 different frameworks*. In this study, we start with the following six: OpenFaaS, nuclio, Gestalt, Riff, Fn and OpenWhisk. You can find an introduction (including slides and videos) to some of these frameworks in this blog post from the last DockerCon Europe.

These frameworks vary a lot in feature set, but can be generalized as having several key elements shown in the following diagram, from the Serverless Architecture from CNCF Serverless Working Group whitepaper:

• Event sources – trigger or stream events into one or more function instances
• Function instances – a single function/microservice, that can be Continue reading