How to compare FaaS and Container-based Serverless offers?

In the last 20 years, few technologies have seen a more meteoric rise than Kubernetes. The container orchestration platform was initially released in 2014, and a 2019 survey by StackRox found that more than 86% of organizations have adopted it, representing a 51% increase over the previous six months. Part of the appeal is users can run Kubernetes in the cloud as well as self-managing it on-premises.

The explosive growth of containers and Kubernetes gave rise to innovative solutions like Kubeless and Knative that married the container workflow, the portability of Kubernetes, and the benefits of serverless.

The 2018 launch of Knative paved the way for a new set of fully-managed serverless offers coming online now.

We identify three essential types of serverless vendors:

1. Function-based (FaaS)
2. Container-based
3. Serverless-native Applications (e.g. AWS Aurora)

For our initial purposes, we are focusing on the first two types.

Table 1: Comparison of FaaS and Container-based Serverless