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Apache OpenWhisk

The best open-source serverless cloud platform, enterprise ready and accessible to all developers.
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What is Apache OpenWhisk?

OpenWhisk is an open source serverless platform. It is enterprise grade and accessible to all developers thanks to its superior programming model and tooling. It powers IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe I/O Runtime, Naver, Nimbella among others.
Apache OpenWhisk is a tool in the Serverless / Task Processing category of a tech stack.
Apache OpenWhisk is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Apache OpenWhisk's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Apache OpenWhisk?

Companies
4 companies reportedly use Apache OpenWhisk in their tech stacks, including jjjj, Nimbella Serverless Platform, and Kupreev Pro.

Developers
32 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Apache OpenWhisk.

Apache OpenWhisk Integrations

JavaScript, Python, Node.js, Visual Studio Code, and Docker are some of the popular tools that integrate with Apache OpenWhisk. Here's a list of all 25 tools that integrate with Apache OpenWhisk.
Pros of Apache OpenWhisk
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You are not tied to a provider. IBM available however
3
Still exploring... its just intresting
Decisions about Apache OpenWhisk

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Apache OpenWhisk in their tech stack.

Currently been using an older version of OpenFaaS, but the new version now requires payment for things we did on the older version. Been looking for alternatives to OpenFaas that have Kafka integrations, and scale to 0 capabilities.

looked at Apache OpenWhisk, but we run on RKE2, and my initial install of Openwhisk appears to be too out of date to support RKE2 and missing images from docker.io. So now looking at Knative. What are your thoughts? We need support to be able to process functions about 10k a min, which can vary on time of execution, between ms and mins. So looking for horizontal scaling that can be controlled by other metrics, than just cpu and ram utilization, but more so, for example if the wait is over 5 scale out.. Issue with older openfaas, was scaling on RKE2 was not working great, for example, I could get it to scale from 5 to 20 pods, but only 12 of them would ever have data, but my backlog would have 100k's of files waiting.. So even though it scaled up, it was as if the distribution of work was only being married to specific pods. If I killed the pods that had no work, they come up again with no work, if I killed one with work, then another pod would scale up and another pod would start to get work. And On occasion with hours, it would reset down to the original deployment allotment of pods, and never scale up again, until I go into Kubernetes and tell it to add more pods.

So hoping to find a solution that doesn't require as much triage, to work with scaling, as points in time we are at higher volume and other points of time could be no volume.

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Apache OpenWhisk's Features

  • Serverless functions
  • FaaS
  • Fine-grained resource consumption
  • Use any language
  • Containers as functions
  • service
  • Functions-as-a-Service
  • Function composition
  • Step Functions
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Open source community
  • Apache

Apache OpenWhisk Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Apache OpenWhisk?
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
Kubeless
Kubeless is a Kubernetes native serverless Framework. Kubeless supports both HTTP and event based functions triggers. It has a serverless plugin, a graphical user interface and multiple runtimes, including Python and Node.js.
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
Amazon EC2
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
See all alternatives

Apache OpenWhisk's Followers
149 developers follow Apache OpenWhisk to keep up with related blogs and decisions.