FaaS is typically associated with the cloud provider of choice and offers convenience and predictability of infrastructure management. However, as developers and enterprises increasingly opt for multi-cloud deployments to ensure redundancy and reduce costs, there is a demand for provider-agnostic FaaS platforms that are portable across workloads and cloud providers.
After collaborating with Justin Mitchel of Coating for Entrepreneurs to teach developers about Knative in an on-demand course, we compare some of the popular provider-agnostic open source FaaS tools and frameworks.
Open FaaS: OpenFaaS is a popular toolset for experimenting and testing functionality on non-production workloads. The paid version of OpenFaaS Pro has a GUI to easily deploy event-driven features and microservices. OpenFaas requires a license for most workloads and we recommend not using the free Community edition in production.
division: Fission is a feature-rich functional framework that provides a wide range of pre-built out-of-the-box integrations, especially for webhooks that trigger events and send notifications through your tool of choice. The Fission cache feature improves performance over time as your application uses some functions more than others.
native: Knative provides a set of building blocks for creating and managing serverless Kubernetes applications, including autoscaling and event-driven computing. Knative allows you to declare your desired state for your cluster state and scale efficiently, such as scaling to zero pods. Knative is highly customizable, extensible, and backed by a large open source community.
Ultimately, all these tools are similar in what they accomplish. However, they differ in setup effort and the amount of configuration required to achieve the unique goals of each application.
As with any developer tool, there are many options on the market, and more will come as the usage and capabilities of the feature continue to expand. We aim to make the functionality seamless on the Akamai cloud platform.
do research Let us know what you’d like to see in the Functions service, or sign up here. We’ll let you know when Functions becomes available in beta.