"The other issue is what value is this all really providing? Kubernetes provides a standard API that abstracts infrastructure and deployments.
The benefit that Lambda brings is very simply connecting together cloud services."
Generally, the benefits of a function service are:
- scale to zero: when a function is not active it won't use any resources and create costs.
- higher level of abstraction: if a piece of software fits well into the FaaS abstraction, it should be more productive to implement and operate it on the FaaS level over lower levels (PaaS, container, IaaS, etc.) K8s in particular is quite a complicated system to target by an app, which is why Knative was started.
If Lambda makes it easy to call other cloud services, I'd say that's a side-effect of a good FaaS implementation. Bringing this benefit to other function services should be a matter of using the right libraries.
> If Lambda makes it easy to call other cloud services ... Bringing this benefit to other function services should be a matter of using the right libraries.
You are correct in that the calling out to other things is just a concern of the function itself, but the value in the 'connecting' that Lambda does is from being _invoked_ by other Cloud services by way of integration to their event systems. e.g. Object storage file creation event X triggers Lambda function Y to update resource Z (resource Z isn't necessarily a Cloud service, it could be a database).
This is why I'm skeptical of on-prem FaaS. It's an easy value proposition to sell when you can use Lambda as an example. But Enterprises have heterogeneous environments so Lambda-like integration into other services is far from a given, and 'scaling to zero' is a little disingenuous because there always needs to be underlying infrastructure (k8s in the case of PFS) running to handle function invocation.
The benefit that Lambda brings is very simply connecting together cloud services."
Generally, the benefits of a function service are:
- scale to zero: when a function is not active it won't use any resources and create costs.
- higher level of abstraction: if a piece of software fits well into the FaaS abstraction, it should be more productive to implement and operate it on the FaaS level over lower levels (PaaS, container, IaaS, etc.) K8s in particular is quite a complicated system to target by an app, which is why Knative was started.
If Lambda makes it easy to call other cloud services, I'd say that's a side-effect of a good FaaS implementation. Bringing this benefit to other function services should be a matter of using the right libraries.
(I work at Pivotal, but not on Riff or Knative)