FaaS is typically associated with your cloud provider of choice, which provides convenience and predictability for infrastructure management. However, as developers and businesses increasingly opt for multicloud deployments to achieve redundancy and reduce costs, this creates demand for provider-agnostic FaaS platforms that are portable across workloads and cloud providers.
After working with Justin Mitchel of Coding for Entrepreneurs to teach developers about Knative with our on-demand course, we’re comparing a few of the popular, provider-agnostic, and open source FaaS tools and frameworks.
OpenFaaS: OpenFaaS is a popular toolset for functions experimentation and testing on non-production workloads. The paid version, OpenFaaS Pro, has a GUI and is a simple way to deploy event-driven functions and microservices. OpenFaas requires a license for most workloads, and they advise against using the free Community edition in production.
Fission: Fission is a feature-rich functions framework that provides a wide range of pre-built integrations right out of the box, especially for webhooks that trigger events and send you notifications via your chosen tool. Fission caches functions to deliver better performance over time as your application uses some functions more than others.
Knative: Knative provides a set of building blocks for creating and managing serverless Kubernetes applications, including automatic scaling and event-driven computing. Knative allows you to declare a desired state for your cluster state and scale efficiently, including scaling to zero pods. Knative is highly customizable and extensible and is backed by a large open source community.
Ultimately, all of these tools are similar in what they can accomplish. However, they differ in setup effort and how much configuration is needed to achieve goals that are specific to each application.
Like other developer tools, there are many options on the market and more to come as functions usage and capabilities continue to expand. We’re aiming to make functions seamless on the Akamai cloud platform.
Take the survey to let us know what you’d like to see in a Functions service, or sign up here and we’ll contact you when Functions is available in beta.
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