News Coverage

Serverless and Containers: Friends or Foes? Serverless versus containers: the tech industry has pitted serverless and containers against each other. We are constantly reminded of the scalability of serverless. We are constantly reminded of the scalability of containers. We are reminded how serverless scales so well. We are reminded how Kubernetes scales so well. Are they talking about the same thing?

Using a FaaS like Fission.io, it made consuming cluster-hosted services like Minio’s S3-compatible APIs very fast and effective to develop with, and in cases like this, exactly as robust and extensible as it needed to be for access to stateful data.

Fission’s own Erwin van Eyk gave a talk at KubeCon China, where he investigates optimizations techniques used in current FaaS platforms and research that helps to optimize the trade-off between cost and performance. He reviews function reuse, autoscaling, resource pooling, function locality, predictive scheduling, and autoscaling. To illustrate these practices along the way, he uses Fission, the open source, Kubernetes-native FaaS platform to demonstrate how you can achieve specific goals around latency, throughput, resource utilization, and cost.

Are you attending KubeCon 2018 in Seattle in December?  If so, I invite you to add Platform9 to your MUST SEE list of vendors.

Fission is an open source framework for serverless functions built on Kubernetes. Fission allows developers to deploy functions-as-a-service without being locked in to any specific cloud provider.

Over the past several years, the use of microservices as a means of driving agile best practices and accelerating software delivery has become more and more commonplace. In an effort to avoid the pitfalls that come with monolithic applications, microservices aim to break your architecture into loosely-coupled components (or, services) that are easier to update independently, improve, scale and manage.

Platform9 has developed an open and vendor-agnostic approach to dealing with the complexities of managing a multicloud environment.

At its core a FaaS runtime requires a container engine of some sort that it can insert functions into, so it is no surprise that almost four years after the Lambda announcement that there are now five FaaS runtimes installable on top of Kubernetes (K8S) that have more than 3,000 stars on GitHub. A sixth behemoth looms on that horizon as well.