The New Stack Podcast

OpenFaaS Creator on the Success of Open Source's Community-Funding Model

Episode Summary

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we sit down with Alex Ellis, creator of OpenFaaS, to discuss the latest update to his open source serverless platform, what this new concept "Serverless 2.0" means, and the difficulties of supporting an open source project. Ellis created OpenFaaS a few years back after wanting to extend the functionality offered by Amazon Web Services' function-as-a-service Lambda to any containerized computing environment, a feature that has since been emulated by other serverless offerings. The idea is that you can package not only your application, but all the supporting libraries and dependencies as well, so they can run as serverless. You are not limited to one cloud provider, or one language runtime.  "I wanted a way to combine my love with Docker with my love of coding," Ellis said. With serverless 2.0, "you can run any code, whether binary or an HTTP server, anyway you like — your laptop, on premises, on OpenShift, in the cloud," Ellis said.  Kubernetes provides the common substrate. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmBG2X7b1Zg

Episode Notes

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we sit down with Alex Ellis, creator of OpenFaaS, to discuss the latest update to his open source serverless platform, what this new concept "Serverless 2.0" means, and the difficulties of supporting an open source project.

Ellis created OpenFaaS a few years back after wanting to extend the functionality offered by Amazon Web Services' function-as-a-service Lambda to any containerized computing environment, a feature that has since been emulated by other serverless offerings. The idea is that you can package not only your application, but all the supporting libraries and dependencies as well, so they can run as serverless. You are not limited to one cloud provider, or one language runtime.  "I wanted a way to combine my love with Docker with my love of coding," Ellis said.

With serverless 2.0, "you can run any code, whether binary or an HTTP server, anyway you like — your laptop, on premises, on OpenShift, in the cloud," Ellis said.  Kubernetes provides the common substrate.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmBG2X7b1Zg