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Comment by stevenacreman | Hacker News Reader

It's even worse than that.

Knative is really an alpha piece of software at version 0.2.2 for the serving component. Riff is also at 0.2.0. What do Pivotal plan to do if both implement breaking changes (extremely likely), maintain a fork?

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. None of these FaaS on Kubernetes products do that. For anyone interested I looked into the current landscape on Kubernetes and gave up since it's all pretty worthless. https://kubedex.com/serverless/

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"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.

(I work at Pivotal, but not on Riff or Knative)

> 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.

> But Enterprises have heterogeneous environments so Lambda-like integration into other services is far from a given

Because it's not a walled garden. As the ecosystem grows that pain (and it's real) will ease.

> 'scaling to zero' is a little disingenuous because there always needs to be underlying infrastructure

The point is to use it more efficiently. Mixed workloads with scale-to-zero help achieve that end.

> What do Pivotal plan to do if both implement breaking changes (extremely likely), maintain a fork?

The main riff team all work for Pivotal and Pivotal was the first external partner brought into Knative by Google. We were the first to submit non-Google PRs and the first to have non-Google approvers.

It would be strange for Pivotal to be blindsided by two projects it is intimately involved in.

Source: as you probably guessed, I work for Pivotal.

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