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Tag: OpenWhisk

  • ASF Moves OpenWhisk Serverless Computing Forward

    ASF Moves OpenWhisk Serverless Computing Forward

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that the OpenWhisk serverless computing framework has now become a high-level open source project.

    Matt Rutkowski, CTO for serverless technologies and advocacy for IBM, said with this announcement, organizations looking to implement an open source serverless computing framework on-premises or in a public cloud now can have confidence the OpenWhisk project is sustainable beyond the handful of vendors, including IBM, that launched it.

    IT organizations of all sizes are embracing serverless computing frameworks as a way to invoke application programming interfaces (APIs) to make additional compute resources available on-demand based on an event. For example, rather than having to embed a lot of additional analytics code within their application, developers alternatively might invoke a serverless computing framework such as OpenWhisk to run analytics whenever necessary.

    The most widely used serverless computing framework today is the Lambda service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, rival cloud service providers have been embracing various open source alternatives to provide similar capabilities. At the same time, some internal IT operations teams are deploying serverless computing frameworks to provide similar capabilities within an internal IT environment.

    Regardless of the approach, Rutkowski said hooks to serverless computing frameworks soon will become ubiquitous hooks within continuous integration/continuous deployment environments. In fact, DevOps environments are likely to expose multiple hooks to different serverless computing frameworks as cloud computing becomes more hybrid, he noted. Plugging in multiple serverless computing frameworks should be relatively trivial because the difference in application programming interface (API) parameters between different serverless computing frameworks is minimal, he added.

    While interest in serverless computing has been running high, deciding which open source serverless computing framework to embrace has been something of a challenge. There are at least a half-dozen active serverless computing frameworks, with new ones being added regularly while other projects fade away. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has made a point of not endorsing any one serverless computing framework in the expectation that many will be adopted for various use cases. Instead, the CNCF has thrown its weight behind a Knative project that provides the middleware required to integrate Kubernetes clusters with multiple serverless computing frameworks.

    Those serverless computing frameworks have already had a profound impact on containerized applications. The first generation of containerized applications was largely stateless. Now stateless functions increasingly are being processed via a serverless computing framework, while stateful applications based on containers that tend to run longer are just now starting to be deployed in production environments.

    Of course, the one fact many IT organizations fail to appreciate is that serverless computing frameworks are built using containers. A serverless computing framework is really a higher-level abstraction of a container platform. The challenge organizations will face now is teaching developers when to rely on a more traditional container platform versus invoking a serverless computing framework to run a child process, for example.

    Whatever path those developers choose, the one thing that is for certain is existing DevOps processes will need to be adjusted accordingly.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IBM BlueMix OpenWhisk Takes Infrastructure Out of the Equation

    IBM BlueMix OpenWhisk Takes Infrastructure Out of the Equation

    Thousands of people descended upon Las Vegas last week for the annual IBM InterConnect conference, where IBM shares its vision with customers and developers and makes big announcements. One of the biggest things Big Blue unveiled was BlueMix OpenWhisk, an event-driven programming service designed for a serverless computing environment.

    OpenWhisk uses an event-driven model, automatically executing code in response to external events such as incoming sensor data or designated triggers. (Event-driven programming is also called serverless programming, because the events themselves more or less become the foundation on which the programming is built.)

    Al Hilwa, program director of Software Development Research for IDC, declared the BlueMix OpenWhisk announcement to be one of the most interesting revelations at the IBM InterConnect conference. “This is IBM’s play in the hot area of serverless back-end computing supporting an event-driven application model like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and technologies from players like iron.io,” he noted. “This is the new face of PaaS, where developers do not have to worry about infrastructure.”

    I recently wrote that advances in DevOps increasingly seem to marginalize the “Ops” part of the equation, essentially making it obsolete: I noted that what you’re left with essentially is developers with the processes and tools to automate the infrastructure back end. Technologies such as containers and services such as AWS Lambda simplify greatly the process of programmatically generating, modifying and maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

    As I summed up in that article, though, Ops won’t really go away. Advances in DevOps and technologies such as serverless computing simply free operations teams. They can spend less time putting out fires or maintaining mundane configurations and focus more on big-picture issues that improve performance and help the company innovate.

    OpenWhisk is evidence of that future. It has the potential to transform IT and accelerate DevOps even more. Developers can develop and deploy applications faster and more seamlessly without the need to worry about the servers or middleware traditionally required. OpenWhisk will handle the necessary code.

    IBM suggested developers can use OpenWhisk to create microservices-based applications, where each individual task or component is developed and maintained separately. Different teams can operate in parallel on their individual elements.

    OpenWhisk joins other serverless computing platforms including Amazon’s AWS Lambda and Google’s Google Cloud Functions. As Hilwa pointed out, there are also emerging players such as iron.io. The unique value that OpenWhisk brings to the table is that it is integrated with the BlueMix platform, which means developers have immediate access to all of the apps, analysis and services BlueMix has to offer.

    IBM will open source the codebase of OpenWhisk itself. That isn’t a surprise, since BlueMix itself is based on open source code and IBM is a major proponent and benefactor of open source projects. The true potential of a tool such as OpenWhisk can be realized more quickly with the community at large helping to evolve it, but IBM can continue to act as consultants and provide deeper services for customers to help them maximize the value of OpenWhisk.