Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a type of cloud computing allowing users to execute a function or single purpose program that removes the complexity that is often associated with servers and software stacks. FaaS cloud providers or more often referred to as, serverless providers that offer FaaS include Amazon Web Services Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions, and Oracle Cloud Fn are public cloud serverless offerings via FaaS.
There are numerous open source projects that allow you to deliver serverless computing on your own infrastructure. These platforms are primarily delivered using an open source development model but are usually backed by a primary sponsor (as shown in the parentheses in the listings below).
Firecracker was developed at Amazon Web Services that mimics the functionality of AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.
Fission is a framework for serverless functions on Kubernetes.
The Fn project is an open-source container-native serverless platform that you can run anywhere — any cloud or on-premise. It’s easy to use, supports every programming language, and is extensible and performant.
Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads.
Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework that lets you deploy small bits of code (functions) without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. It is designed to be deployed on top of a Kubernetes cluster and take advantage of all the great Kubernetes primitives.
OpenFaas is a serverless framework for Docker and Kubernetes that is maintained by Alex Ellis who is employed by VMware.
Apache OpenWhisk is an open source, distributed Serverless platform that executes functions (fx) in response to events at any scale. OpenWhisk manages the infrastructure, servers and scaling using Docker containers so you can focus on building amazing and efficient applications.
The Serverless Framework is written using Node.js by Serverless Inc. Serverless can be deployed to other function-as-a-service providers, including Microsoft Azure with Azure Functions, IBM Bluemix with IBM Cloud Functions based on Apache OpenWhisk, Google Cloud using Google Cloud Functions, Oracle Cloud using Oracle Fn, Kubeless based on Kubernetes, Spotinst and Webtask by Auth0.
When choosing to provide your own serverless infrastructure you may want to look at the following factors;
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