corporate
2018/07/15
 
15 Jul, 2018 | 3 min read

Announcing the WSO2 Serverless Solution

  • Ken Oestreich
  • VP Product Marketing - WSO2

Most enterprises today looking for serverless solutions have few options without cloud lock-in. Remember that public serverless offerings will capture a customer’s data, lock out external event streams, and likely limit developer language choice. This lock-in hinders application migration, multi-cloud scaling, and the use of private cloud resources. A more palatable solution ought to allow organizations to tap serverless for disaggregated architectures, and allow them to utilize both public and private cloud resources, event models, and programming paradigms.

In response, customers today are mostly forced to use public serverless offerings from AWS (Lambda), MSFT, GOOG, etc., with limitations placed on the supported programming languages for each. Users are further locked-in because of the need to use adjacent proprietary services like the cloud’s storage services. And if a company wants to use an alternative, they’ll require considerable investment to manage.

Enter the WSO2 serverless solution

Today we’re introducing the WSO2 Serverless Solution, a private function hosting environment based on Apache OpenWhisk and Kubernetes. And it’s immediately available, though on a limited-access basis.

To develop the solution, WSO2 has been working with Rodric Rabbah and Perry Cheng, co-founders of CASM LLC and co-creators of Apache OpenWhisk. They bring in-depth knowledge on custom deployments and backend optimizations to the overall solution, and both continue to be active members of the OpenWhisk community.

The solution allows organizations to leverage their existing event sources and programming languages. Underlying the open source function platform, Apache OpenWhisk allows developers to plug existing event sources into the solution. It also allows developers to use their preferred programming language as a function runtime which will allow them to re-use most existing code, and allows users to define their own custom resource limits. These combine to provide greater overall agility to a serverless solution. And you’ll have freedom from cloud lock-in.

And the best part is that the WSO2 Serverless Solution is a private hosted platform managed by WSO2, so it ought to significantly reduce learning, set-up and maintenance overhead for DevOps teams.

A little more detail...

The serverless solution is fundamentally powered by Apache OpenWhisk and Kubernetes to allow IT orgs to provide a uniform, elastic, and secure platform for reactive, event-based, and batch workloads.

The Solution offers several unique capabilities:

  • Private function platform - powered by Apache OpenWhisk deployed on top of Kubernetes
  • Managed hosting environment - provided by WSO2, mapped to internal private resources and events, with customized elasticity.
  • Private, dedicated servers and operations - provides segregated tenancy
  • Support for any programming language - broader support than any single public cloud vendor
  • Leverage any existing event source - no matter where you deploy
  • Transparent computational elasticity - to support both short and long running computation
  • Guaranteed computational capacity - because it is a private function environment
  • Secure platform, plus service isolation, and encryption of data in motion
  • Local development environment - for developer teams
  • Dev tracing and operations of event-driven apps with logging, monitoring, and analytics

Why did we do this?

WSO2’s mission is to help digitally-driven organizations become integration-agile. And we do that with a platform of open-source Integration, API Management, Identity Management and related products. One core motive of ours (and of the overall open source model) is freedom from lock-in... So it stood to reason that if we wanted to simplify integration tasks, it would require simplifying deployment tasks too. So we developed this cloud-vendor-neutral deployment approach to complement our products.

Availability

As mentioned, the solution is immediately available on an early-access basis. Pricing is offered at a flat rate, on either a monthly or annual billing. For more information see the WSO2 Serverless Solution.

Undefined