
CNCF Serverless Whitepaper v1.0 - melqdusy
https://github.com/cncf/wg-serverless/tree/master/whitepaper
======
jacques_chester
I've worked on a PaaS and currently work on a FaaS. This whitepaper is
thorough and quite fair. I have a few nitpicks by they're minor in comparison
to the bulk of it.

Personally I think of FaaSes as having more in common with PaaSes than
anything else, so I'm motivated to reuse existing technologies where possible.

Particularly, I expect the FaaS I work on (Project Riff) will eventually use
buildpacks as the onramp. It helps that I work across the aisle from the Cloud
Foundry Buildpacks team.

Kudos to the WG.

~~~
friendly_chap
I agree with you 100%. It's the same old thing with barely any changes. There
is truly nothing new under the sun and we keep reinventing the same things.

I like to think this industry is full of smart people, but it always makes me
surprised how willing are we to drink the kool aid.

Guess being smart and having a herd mentality are not mutually exclusive.
(Perhaps they are actually correlated? :P - Ie. my professor advised me to use
the Linux Distro my friend uses, because then I get ask for help from
someone.)

~~~
jacques_chester
There isn't anything new, but it's also worth remembering Mark Twain's quip:
history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes, it rhymes.

FaaSes do add some twists on CGI. In CGI the short-livedness is the _process_
, in a FaaS it's the _container_. A CGI program can get away with relying on
local modifications to a file system in a shared environment. FaaSes somewhat
point away from that.

There's also the speed of scaling. Insofar as FaaSes rely on lower layers to
insulate the layer between process and machine, it becomes plausible to grab a
number of machines relatively quickly. There's a cold start cost, to be sure,
but the cold start on "launch this container" is probably better than "install
this software and then launch it".

~~~
rubiquity
I don’t disagree that FaaS and CGI are wildly different but I’m not sure I
understand your distinction between containers and processes. Containers are
processes decorated with networking namespaces, control groups, and chroot.

~~~
jacques_chester
The thing I'm driving at is that containers create much stronger isolation
than shared hosting does.

Both are processes, but the administrative overhead is lower when you can
contain the blast radius with namespaces and cgroups. The illusion of
isolation is much more complete to the containerised process than for an
uncontainerised one.

------
keithwhor
I noticed this non-exhaustive list has left out StdLib [1], an all-in-one API
development, provisioning, and FaaS platform with tens of thousands of
developers. (Disclaimer: am founder :))

We don’t work directly with the CNCF because we’re a four person team; we
don’t have the bandwidth to engage in committees. We innovate as best we can
with our platform and deliver value directly to customers.

The reason you, as a developer and reader of Hacker News, should know about us
is because we’re consensus building with some of your favorite companies and
we’re the easiest way to manage your entire API: from development (we have a
local dev story) to deployment, documentation, automatically generated SDKs
for your customers, custom docs pages and more.

You’ll be learning a lot more in the coming weeks and we’re very excited to
share what we’ve been building and the relationships we’ve secured as a
platform.

If anybody from the CNCF would like to reach out, I’m keith@ (our domain).
Same goes for any developers or curious Hacker News readers: my Inbox is open.
:)

[1] [https://stdlib.com/](https://stdlib.com/)

~~~
aberoham
CNCF member company employee here. The working groups I've paid close
attention to are very collaborative and open, they even preface their slide
decks with a strict antitrust notice. Redpoint has an investment in and
obviously some level of interest in one of their portfolio company's FaaS
offering. It's kind of surprising that you prefice your comment on being "left
out" while mentioning the aid of Redpoint. Has the CNCF or one of its working
groups not been receptive when you or a team member has looked to contribute?
How does your "censensus building" differ from what they are doing?

In any case, this thread might be a good place to call out specific
differences between StdLib and those other, more established CNCF members.

~~~
keithwhor
I don’t have any bones to pick with the CNCF: we’ve had opportunities to get
connected and become involved, it’s just not in our best interests at this
point to be super proactive. There’s so much surface area left to innovate
upon and we have a finite amount of resources (we doubled our team size
recently and will be doubling again shortly). You’re doing a fantastic job,
and this whitepaper is great! I’d love to add in our $0.02 in the future, but
that’s probably best done over e-mail: you can email me or I’m happy to reach
out.

The differences in consensus building we’re doing are specifically around
Serverless APIs and Serverless technology as a means to lower the barrier to
entry into software development as a whole. There are some moving parts here
that I’m not comfortable sharing publicly yet, but they’ll be announced likely
by end of quarter.

