FUNCTION AS A SERVICE IN THE ENTERPRISE’S PRIVATE CLOUD

Abstract

The article analyzes the advantages and limitations of FaaS technology, trends in the development of cloud technologies that contribute to its use in the organization’s own cloud infrastructure, and additional benefits that it can provide. A comparison of the most common open source, self-hosted FaaS frameworks is also provided. FaaS technology is a cloud computing model that provides a platform for executing functionally complete pieces of code that are triggered by events. The platform provides automatic scaling and management of computing resources, abstracting low-level infrastructure decisions away from developers. FaaS is aimed at increasing the efficiency of programmers, reducing operating costs and saving money when paying for provider resources on demand. This model can provide benefits for a wide range of tasks.FaaS is growing in popularity and use in production. However, public providers cannot meet all user needs. Overcoming the limitations of public clouds is possible with private and hybrid cloud models, the choice of which for building corporate cloud infrastructure is observed as a stable trend in the world. Other trends driving the adoption of FaaS platforms in organizations’ own clouds include the rise of container-based, microservice-based, and event-driven architectures in application development, a focus on the Kubernetes container orchestration and deployment platform, and the rise of Managed Kubernetes offerings from cloud providers. The use of FaaS frameworks fits well with these technologies and additionally allows for more efficient use of Kubernetes cluster resources, overcom the limitations inherent in public FaaS services, avoid provider-lock, and deploying applications in any cloud infrastructure. Among the existing Open Source self-hosted FaaS frameworks with Kubernetes support, OpenFaas, OpenWhisk and Knative were selected for a more detailed comparison, which are mature solutions, have a wide range of users and active support. Knowing their characteristics and features will help organizations in choosing the platform that best suits their goals and business tasks.