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A startup has emerged to take on the nascent space for serverless functions management. On Nov. 1 TriggerMesh officially launched, announcing a serverless management platform built on top of Kubernetes.
TriggerMesh makes use of the open-source Knative project, which is a Kubernetes container orchestration based framework for building, deploying and managing serverless workloads. The TriggerMesh technology will be available both for on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based deployments, enabling a multicloud management approach for serverless functions.
“You can think of us like an Amazon Lambda clone, where we’re using Kubernetes and Knative to provide a Lambda-like experience,” Mark Hinkle, co-founder of TriggerMesh, told eWEEK. “But we’re going beyond Lambda, providing life cycle management for functions.”
Hinkle is no stranger to the open-source and cloud world, having previously served as the executive director of the Linux Foundation’s Node.js Foundation. His co-founder Sebastien Goasguen founded Skippbox and is the creator of the Kubeless open-source serverless framework. Skippbox was acquired by Bitnami in March 2017.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered the concept of serverless with its Lambda service. With serverless, which is also referred to as functions-as-a-service, events trigger functions to execute, without the need for a long-running, persistent server.
With TriggerMesh, a user will first provide credentials for a given cloud and source control system, like GitHub, Hinkle said. The user then places their functions into the source control system, and TriggerMesh can then push the function out to a cloud or existing Knative cluster. Hinkle said that TriggerMesh inserts the functions for execution and handles any required auto-scaling.
“Then we have other ideas including a trigger library, where you have pre-populated triggers that your function can use,” he said. “On top of that will, over time, we’ll build a function library so people can read functions that others have.”
At its core, TriggerMesh is about enabling multicloud for serverless functions. Hinkle said users should have the option to publish serverless functions to whatever cloud they want. Users can shop across public clouds to get the right price/performance mix and put different functions in different places, he said.
“The things we [TriggerMesh] want to focus on are places where the cloud providers aren’t going to go, like cloud portability and CI/CD [continuous integration/ continuous development],” Hinkle said.
Serverless Use Cases
The move toward serverless is being driven by a number of different use cases, including cost efficiency and control. Hinkle noted that TriggerMesh already has several customers that are using the platform. One of TriggerMesh’s clients has a lot of disparate developers, and they all want to have a good experience for taking their serverless functions from source control to the cloud of their choice, he said.
“Basically, they have 100,000 open-source projects, and a subset of them are serverless. They want to just be able to push from their source control and have the developers not worry about any of the operationalization,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.