Introducing Redpoint’s FaaS Landscape

This year Gartner added serverless to its “Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies,” reflecting the explosion of interest in Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). Gartner categorizes serverless as being in the initial cycle phase, “innovation trigger,” and we agree. AWS Lambda was a breakthrough technology that catalyzed innovation and led to a proliferation of FaaS-focused initiatives, but it remains early. From open source projects to commercial software, we hope our landscape sheds light on the cornucopia of offerings and provides clarity on how they interrelate.

We identified over 50 FaaS solutions within the ecosystem. The vast majority are open source and many are supported by a pre-existing business like Platform9’s Fission. As the market matures we expect to see an increasing number of commercial offerings beyond FaaS platforms from hyperscale cloud providers. While Gartner forecasts mainstream serverless adoption being 3–5 years away, we believe it will become more widespread in 2–3 year, and the solutions showcased above demonstrate the great promise of the emerging technology.

Please note that this landscape is a living document that will continue to evolve along with the market and will be hosted on GitHub. We appreciate feedback, and it can be sent to amyers@redpoint.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Tools

• Clay: Creates serverless HTTPS functions instantly
• Dashbird: Monitoring, analytics and error tracking of Lambda functions
• IOPipe: Application performance monitoring for Lambda
• LambCI: A continuous integration system built on AWS Lambda
• Lambdacult: Open-source continuous integration tool built on AWS Lambda
• Node Lambda: Command line tool to locally run and deploy your node.js application to Amazon Lambda
• Stackery: Serverless operations console that provides automation, predictable performance, and operational control

Libraries

• FDK: Node.js library to improve developer experience developing Serverless applications
• Python-λ: Library for developing and deploying serverless Python code in AWS Lambda
• Standard Library (StdLib): Standard library for functions to help turn them into infinitely scalable, self-healing web services

Security

• PureSec: Security built for severless architectures
• Snyk: Finds and fixes vulnerabilities in dependencies

Frameworks

• Apex: Helps build, deploy, and manage AWS Lambda functions
• AWS Chalice: Python serverless microframework for AWS
• AWS SAM: Prescribes rules for expressing serverless applications on AWS
• Claudiajs: Automates all the error-prone deployment and configuration tasks, and sets everything up the way JavaScript developers expect out of the box
• Dawson: Serverless web framework for Node.js on AWS
• Deep: Full-stack JavaScript framework for cloud-native web applications
• EFFE: Open source implementation of AWS Lambda
• Gordon: Tool to create, wire and deploy AWS Lambdas using CloudFormation
• Kappa: Command line tool to make it easier to deploy, update, and test functions for AWS Lambda.
• Lambada: JAX-RS implementation for AWS Lambda
• Lambda-uploader: Helps package and upload Python lambda functions to AWS
• Lambder: Simplifies the creation and deployment of cron jobs
• Lambda Forest: Microframework that provides a set of tools to make it easier to develop REST API’s using the AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway
• Lambdify: Convenient functions to transform sympy expressions to lambda functions which can be used to calculate numerical values very fast
• Lambdoku: Heroku-like experience when using AWS Lambda
• Lambda-restify: Restify/expressjs like interface for AWS Lambda with API Gateway
• Pivotal Spring Cloud Function: Support a uniform programming model across serverless providers, as well as the ability to run standalone (locally or in a PaaS)
• Scar: Framework to transparently execute containers out of Docker images in AWS Lambda
• Serverless: Single toolkit for deploying serverless architectures to any provider
• Shep: Framework for building APIs using AWS API Gateway and Lambda
• Sparta: Go framework for AWS Lambda microservices
• Squeezer: Framework designed to help developers to get a better architecture on serverless zero-administration compute platforms
• Zappa: Helps developers build and deploy server-less Python applications on AWS Lambda and API Gateway

Platforms

• AWS Lambda: Platform that lets developers run code without provisioning or managing servers
• Auth0 Webtask: Platform written in Node.js
• Binaris: FaaS platform that’s optimized for predictable, low latency
• Bitnami Kubeless: Kubernetes native serverless platform
• Distribyte: Serverless platform (stealth)
• Galactic Fog: Container management and serverless implementation
• Google Functions: Serverless environment on Google’s infrastructure
• IBM Cloud Function: FaaS based on Apache OpenWhisk
• Iguaz.IO Nuclio: High-performance serverless event and data processing framework
• LeverOS: Open-source cloud platform that allows teams to build and deploy microservice-oriented backends
• Microsoft Functions: Event-driven serverless compute experience
• Nano Lambda: Automated compute service which runs and scales your micro-services
• OpenFaaS: Serverless solution for Docker and Kubernetes
• OpenLambda: Apache-licensed serverless computing project, written in Go and based on Linux containers.
• Oracle Fn (team behind Iron.IO): Serverless app platform empowering enterprises to reliably scale their Docker-based jobs on any cloud, public, private, or on-premises
• Overclock (OvrClk): Serverless platform provider that delivers high-performance workloads at the edge
• OVH Functions: Lets developers run event-driven, serverless functions at scale
• Platform9 Fission: Open-source, serverless platform built on Kubernetes with a focus on developer productivity and high performance
• PubNub Blocks: Serverless environment to execute functions on the edge, transforming, enriching, and filtering messages as they route through the PubNub network
• Red Hat Apache OpenWhisk: Serverless, open source cloud platform that executes functions in response to events at any scale
• Red Hat Funktion: Lambda style event-based programming model for Kubernetes
• Spotinst Functions: Fully managed serverless compute platform that allows running code without thinking about cloud providers
• Syncano: Serverless application platform to build powerful real-time apps
• Twilio Functions: Serverless environment to build and run your Twilio code
• Weblab.io: Platform to run functions that are self-heal and scale as needed