If you want to run one of the most cutting-edge infrastructure setups on the block, StackPointCloud is partnering with Bitnami to allow customers of its Kubernetes-management software to run the Kubeless open-source serverless software on top of their Kubernetes clusters.
StackPointCloud, based in downtown Seattle, operates a service that manages Kubernetes clusters across multiple public cloud providers. Kubernetes is one of the hotter open-source products in enterprise technology at the moment, but even its most prominent supporters concede that it requires a fair amount of expertise if you want to use it to manage containerized applications at scale. So customers pay StackPointCloud to manage that complexity, and the company now plans to offer customers the ability to run Kubeless, an open-source serverless framework that is managed by Bitnami, through its service, said CEO Matt Baldwin.
Serverless is a promising new software development technology that allows developers to define their apps in terms of functions and events, which allows them to write code without having to care about the hardware that runs that code. (The servers are still there.) Backers believe it could pave the way for easier multicloud app deployment strategies, and it piques the interest of the business folks because it allows cloud computing costs to be calculated by the second, rather than the hour.
However, it’s still very much in the early phases of its development. In fact, “all serverless is at a state where I don’t think I’d recommend using serverless for any production environment,” Baldwin said. There are a few companies that have taken that plunge, but the vast majority of developers using serverless technologies are testing it in order to understand how it could be best used inside their apps, he said.
Those developers have expressed interest in running Kubeless atop their Kubernetes clusters because they are intrigued by the self-healing and auto-scaling capabilities that it can bring to their applications, Baldwin said. As the name implies, Kubeless was designed to be the most Kubernetes-friendly serverless framework, nominally competing with the framework developed by San Francisco’s Serverless. Serverless announced support for Kubeless last week.
StackPointCloud customers will be able to use Kubeless through its Kubernetes service on the Big Three major cloud platforms, and also on Digital Ocean, the developer-oriented cloud.
