Ask HN: Are there any open-source alternatives to AWS Lambda | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any open-source alternatives to AWS Lambda

8 pointstombert10 comments

Hello!

I recently started playing with AWS Lambda, and the entire thing intrigues me, but due to some legal chicanery at work, I can't use it for anything in production.

This got me thinking, though...Is there any good frameworks/platforms/whatever for running a Function as a Service on your own hardware?

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Here's something which recently got pretty popular on GitHub within just a few days. It's a framework to run serverless functions through Docker Swarm:

https://github.com/alexellis/faas

A couple of choices are fission from platform9 and kubeless from bitnami.

Alternatively you could try IBM OpenWhisk or Azure Functions, both of which are open source.

I worked on https://github.com/siscia/effe which is basically a templare where you Write Your function in go.

You compile it down to a single executable and then you do whatever you want with it.

I can't provide the autodeploy part though...

This is something I've been curious about but not found many encouraging projects so far.

Also, props for using a term that actually makes some sense (Functions as a Service) as opposed to that other name thats so popular.

Most things I've seen so far are docker-based, which is a non-starter for me.

What are the features of AWS that you need? For example, do you really need an enormous amount of elasticity? If not then a single powerful server that people can ssh to might be fine. How long are you waiting for various jobs to finish?

Mostly what I want is the ease of "writing a function as a callback and deploy it".

Do you need the streaming features? IE, would a json endpoint in a technology of your choice be good enough? Would a message queue like rabbitmq be appropriate?

I've heard a bit about iron.io, but couldn't tell you anything about them past that.

They have a writeup comparing themselves to AWS Lambda here: https://www.iron.io/aws-lambda-vs-ironworker/

Also, the OP may be interested in their open source project that allows self-hosting: https://github.com/iron-io/functions

As an ex-customer of iron.io, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. They've been downsizing for awhile - I wouldn't be surprised if they ceased operations any day now.

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