Serverless computing has rapidly gained traction in the landscape of cloud computing. Despite its name, serverless doesn't mean servers are absent, but rather that the infrastructure management tasks are abstracted away from the developers. Kubernetes, recognized widely for orchestrating containers, offers an excellent environment for serverless computing. This blog post will delve into the top 5 open-source serverless projects deployable on Kubernetes.
1. Knative
Knative is a platform based on Kubernetes, built to deploy and manage contemporary serverless workloads. It provides abstractions for deploying, autoscaling, and routing of serverless applications.
Key features:
- Ease of use: Facilitates building, deploying, and managing serverless workload applications.
- Event-driven architecture: Enables code execution in response to events.
- Autoscaling: Automatically scales your applications according to incoming traffic.
2. OpenFaaS
OpenFaaS (Function as a Service) is a framework that turns anything into a serverless function, running on Kubernetes.
Key features:
- Portability: Allows OpenFaaS to run on any hardware or cloud setup.
- Auto-scaling: Scales per demand and reduces to zero scale when idle.
- Rich ecosystem: Supports multiple programming languages and templates.
3. Kubeless
Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework. It enables the deployment of small code bits without the need to be concerned about the underlying infrastructure.
Key features:
- Kubernetes-native: Utilizes Kubernetes resources to provide auto-scaling, API routing, monitoring, troubleshooting, and more.
- Supports multiple languages: Including Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, and .NET.
- Event-driven: Triggers functions from Kubernetes events and HTTP(S) requests.
4. Nuclio
Nuclio is a high-performance, open-source, and Kubernetes-native serverless framework.
Key features:
- High Performance: Processes event triggers with low latency, and can handle high frequencies.
- Real-time data processing: Ideal for data, analytics, and machine learning workloads.
- Multiple language support: Supports Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, Shell, and .NET core.
5. OpenWhisk
OpenWhisk is a serverless, open-source cloud platform capable of executing functions in response to events at any scale.
Key features:
- Highly scalable: OpenWhisk operates on-demand, enabling high scalability.
- Variety of language support: Supports JavaScript, Swift, Java, Go, and more.
- Rich integration: Includes integration with Apache Kafka for real-time streaming and reactive programming.
In conclusion, serverless computing allows developers to focus on their application's core functionality without having to worry about server management. All these open-source serverless projects offer distinctive features and strengths. Depending on your specific needs, you can select the one that suits your requirements best.