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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Serverless functions are a terrible idea. Way too restrictive and proprietary. Kubernetes is the future. Amazon throwing money behind the Serverless trend is only delaying the inevitable universal success of a standardized, open source container orchestration platform.

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Your argument against serverless functions holds for AWS Lambda, but this Gitlab feature is based on Knative. That's an open source serverless platform based on Kubernetes.

I think all money Amazon is throwing at serverless is to build a foundation to ultimately transform all their "managed" services into a serverless form. They already released serverless RDS (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/).

Good to know that it's open source. I should have looked it up first.

My understanding of Serverless was that it was synonymous with 'Functions as a Service'. What Knative seems to be doing is more like 'Backend as a Service'. I guess it's good to know that these two very different approaches are now both labeling themselves as 'Serverless'. I guess Knative is just hitchhiking on top of Amazon's marketing success around the 'Serverless' term.

I'm fairly certain that under the hood serverless RDS is just "intelligently and dynamically adjusting the instance type with zero downtime" though, not really technically interesting compared to Lambda-serverless.

I don't understand, half of this announcement refers to the fact that this new feature is built upon Knative:

> It leverages Knative, which enables autoscaling down to zero and backup to run serverless workloads on Kubernetes.

So what are you referring to?

Hey, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Sorry for the confusion with the words. We actually meant "back up" which has a bit different context. Fixing that in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

It’s based on Knative I think, so this is an open source, kubernetes-based alternative tied into GitLab.

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