Alternatives to Apache OpenWhisk logo

Alternatives to Apache OpenWhisk

AWS Lambda, Kubeless, JavaScript, Git, and GitHub are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Apache OpenWhisk.
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What is Apache OpenWhisk and what are its top alternatives?

Apache OpenWhisk is an open-source, serverless computing platform that allows developers to run code in response to events without having to manage servers. It supports multiple programming languages and has features like triggers, actions, and rules. However, there are some limitations like complex setup and lack of built-in monitoring and debugging tools.

  1. AWS Lambda: AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service from Amazon Web Services. It supports multiple programming languages, integrates with other AWS services, and allows scalable execution of code in response to events. Pros include easy integration with other AWS services, while cons include potential vendor lock-in.

  2. Google Cloud Functions: Google Cloud Functions is a serverless computing service from Google Cloud Platform. It supports multiple programming languages, scales automatically, and integrates with other Google Cloud services. Pros include seamless integration with Google Cloud services, while cons include limited language support.

  3. Microsoft Azure Functions: Azure Functions is a serverless computing service from Microsoft Azure. It supports multiple programming languages, provides seamless integration with other Azure services, and offers flexible pricing options. Pros include seamless integration with Azure services, while cons include potential vendor lock-in.

  4. IBM Cloud Functions: IBM Cloud Functions is a serverless computing service from IBM Cloud. It supports multiple programming languages, enables event-driven programming, and offers an intuitive user interface. Pros include integration with other IBM Cloud services, while cons include restricted deployment options.

  5. Kubeless: Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework that allows developers to deploy functions without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. It supports multiple programming languages, auto-scales based on demand, and provides a flexible runtime environment. Pros include seamless integration with Kubernetes, while cons include added complexity compared to traditional serverless platforms.

  6. Fission: Fission is a fast serverless framework for Kubernetes-based applications. It supports multiple programming languages, offers a low-latency execution environment, and seamlessly scales based on workload. Pros include easy deployment on Kubernetes clusters, while cons include potential complexity for beginners.

  7. OpenFaaS: OpenFaaS is an open-source serverless platform built on top of Docker and Kubernetes. It supports multiple programming languages, provides a simple user experience, and enables event-driven architectures. Pros include portability with Docker containers, while cons include additional management overhead compared to managed services.

  8. Nuclio: Nuclio is a high-performance serverless framework that is optimized for event-driven data processing. It supports multiple programming languages, offers real-time processing capabilities, and integrates with various data sources. Pros include high performance for data processing, while cons include limited support for non-event-driven workloads.

  9. IronFunctions: IronFunctions is an open-source serverless platform that can run on any cloud or on-premises. It supports multiple programming languages, offers a simple and flexible architecture, and allows developers to build functions with ease. Pros include portability across different environments, while cons include potential challenges in managing a self-hosted solution.

  10. TriggerMesh: TriggerMesh is a multi-cloud serverless management platform that enables seamless deployment and operation of event-driven applications across different cloud environments. It supports multiple programming languages, provides advanced event routing capabilities, and offers observability features. Pros include multi-cloud deployment options, while cons include potential complexity in managing cross-cloud workflows.

Top Alternatives to Apache OpenWhisk

  • AWS Lambda
    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

    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. ...

  • Serverless
    Serverless

    Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more. ...

  • Azure Functions
    Azure Functions

    Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems. ...

  • Google Cloud Functions
    Google Cloud Functions

    Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running ...

  • Cloud Functions for Firebase
    Cloud Functions for Firebase

    Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you create functions that are triggered by Firebase products, such as changes to data in the Realtime Database, uploads to Cloud Storage, new user sign ups via Authentication, and conversion events in Analytics. ...

  • Apex
    Apex

    Apex is a small tool for deploying and managing AWS Lambda functions. With shims for languages not yet supported by Lambda, you can use Golang out of the box. ...

  • Google Cloud Run
    Google Cloud Run

    A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management. ...

Apache OpenWhisk alternatives & related posts

AWS Lambda logo

AWS Lambda

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Automatically run code in response to modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, messages in Kinesis streams, or...
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PROS OF AWS LAMBDA
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    No infrastructure
  • 83
    Cheap
  • 70
    Quick
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    Stateless
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    No deploy, no server, great sleep
  • 12
    AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it
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    Event Driven Governance
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    Extensive API
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    Auto scale and cost effective
  • 6
    Easy to deploy
  • 5
    VPC Support
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    Integrated with various AWS services
CONS OF AWS LAMBDA
  • 7
    Cant execute ruby or go
  • 3
    Compute time limited
  • 1
    Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort

related AWS Lambda posts

Jeyabalaji Subramanian

Recently we were looking at a few robust and cost-effective ways of replicating the data that resides in our production MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database for data warehousing and business intelligence.

We set ourselves the following criteria for the optimal tool that would do this job: - The data replication must be near real-time, yet it should NOT impact the production database - The data replication must be horizontally scalable (based on the load), asynchronous & crash-resilient

Based on the above criteria, we selected the following tools to perform the end to end data replication:

We chose MongoDB Stitch for picking up the changes in the source database. It is the serverless platform from MongoDB. One of the services offered by MongoDB Stitch is Stitch Triggers. Using stitch triggers, you can execute a serverless function (in Node.js) in real time in response to changes in the database. When there are a lot of database changes, Stitch automatically "feeds forward" these changes through an asynchronous queue.

We chose Amazon SQS as the pipe / message backbone for communicating the changes from MongoDB to our own replication service. Interestingly enough, MongoDB stitch offers integration with AWS services.

In the Node.js function, we wrote minimal functionality to communicate the database changes (insert / update / delete / replace) to Amazon SQS.

Next we wrote a minimal micro-service in Python to listen to the message events on SQS, pickup the data payload & mirror the DB changes on to the target Data warehouse. We implemented source data to target data translation by modelling target table structures through SQLAlchemy . We deployed this micro-service as AWS Lambda with Zappa. With Zappa, deploying your services as event-driven & horizontally scalable Lambda service is dumb-easy.

In the end, we got to implement a highly scalable near realtime Change Data Replication service that "works" and deployed to production in a matter of few days!

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Tim Nolet

Heroku Docker GitHub Node.js hapi Vue.js AWS Lambda Amazon S3 PostgreSQL Knex.js Checkly is a fairly young company and we're still working hard to find the correct mix of product features, price and audience.

We are focussed on tech B2B, but I always wanted to serve solo developers too. So I decided to make a $7 plan.

Why $7? Simply put, it seems to be a sweet spot for tech companies: Heroku, Docker, Github, Appoptics (Librato) all offer $7 plans. They must have done a ton of research into this, so why not piggy back that and try it out.

Enough biz talk, onto tech. The challenges were:

  • Slice of a portion of the functionality so a $7 plan is still profitable. We call this the "plan limits"
  • Update API and back end services to handle and enforce plan limits.
  • Update the UI to kindly state plan limits are in effect on some part of the UI.
  • Update the pricing page to reflect all changes.
  • Keep the actual processing backend, storage and API's as untouched as possible.

In essence, we went from strictly volume based pricing to value based pricing. Here come the technical steps & decisions we made to get there.

  1. We updated our PostgreSQL schema so plans now have an array of "features". These are string constants that represent feature toggles.
  2. The Vue.js frontend reads these from the vuex store on login.
  3. Based on these values, the UI has simple v-if statements to either just show the feature or show a friendly "please upgrade" button.
  4. The hapi API has a hook on each relevant API endpoint that checks whether a user's plan has the feature enabled, or not.

Side note: We offer 10 SMS messages per month on the developer plan. However, we were not actually counting how many people were sending. We had to update our alerting daemon (that runs on Heroku and triggers SMS messages via AWS SNS) to actually bump a counter.

What we build is basically feature-toggling based on plan features. It is very extensible for future additions. Our scheduling and storage backend that actually runs users' monitoring requests (AWS Lambda) and stores the results (S3 and Postgres) has no knowledge of all of this and remained unchanged.

Hope this helps anyone building out their SaaS and is in a similar situation.

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Kubeless logo

Kubeless

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Kubernetes Native Serverless Framework
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PROS OF KUBELESS
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    CONS OF KUBELESS
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      Serverless logo

      Serverless

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      The most widely-adopted toolkit for building serverless applications
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      PROS OF SERVERLESS
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        API integration
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        Openwhisk
      CONS OF SERVERLESS
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        Praveen Mooli
        Engineering Manager at Taylor and Francis · | 18 upvotes · 3.8M views

        We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.

        To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas

        To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS

        #Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless

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        Nitzan Shapira

        At Epsagon, we use hundreds of AWS Lambda functions, most of them are written in Python, and the Serverless Framework to pack and deploy them. One of the issues we've encountered is the difficulty to package external libraries into the Lambda environment using the Serverless Framework. This limitation is probably by design since the external code your Lambda needs can be usually included with a package manager.

        In order to overcome this issue, we've developed a tool, which we also published as open-source (see link below), which automatically packs these libraries using a simple npm package and a YAML configuration file. Support for Node.js, Go, and Java will be available soon.

        The GitHub respoitory: https://github.com/epsagon/serverless-package-external

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        Azure Functions logo

        Azure Functions

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        Listen and react to events across your stack
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        PROS OF AZURE FUNCTIONS
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          Pay only when invoked
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          Great developer experience for C#
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          Multiple languages supported
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          Great debugging support
        • 5
          Can be used as lightweight https service
        • 4
          Easy scalability
        • 3
          WebHooks
        • 3
          Costo
        • 2
          Event driven
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          Azure component events for Storage, services etc
        • 2
          Poor developer experience for C#
        CONS OF AZURE FUNCTIONS
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          No persistent (writable) file system available
        • 1
          Poor support for Linux environments
        • 1
          Sporadic server & language runtime issues
        • 1
          Not suited for long-running applications

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        Kestas Barzdaitis
        Entrepreneur & Engineer · | 16 upvotes · 764.9K views

        CodeFactor being a #SAAS product, our goal was to run on a cloud-native infrastructure since day one. We wanted to stay product focused, rather than having to work on the infrastructure that supports the application. We needed a cloud-hosting provider that would be reliable, economical and most efficient for our product.

        CodeFactor.io aims to provide an automated and frictionless code review service for software developers. That requires agility, instant provisioning, autoscaling, security, availability and compliance management features. We looked at the top three #IAAS providers that take up the majority of market share: Amazon's Amazon EC2 , Microsoft's Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

        AWS has been available since 2006 and has developed the most extensive services ant tools variety at a massive scale. Azure and GCP are about half the AWS age, but also satisfied our technical requirements.

        It is worth noting that even though all three providers support Docker containerization services, GCP has the most robust offering due to their investments in Kubernetes. Also, if you are a Microsoft shop, and develop in .NET - Visual Studio Azure shines at integration there and all your existing .NET code works seamlessly on Azure. All three providers have serverless computing offerings (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions). Additionally, all three providers have machine learning tools, but GCP appears to be the most developer-friendly, intuitive and complete when it comes to #Machinelearning and #AI.

        The prices between providers are competitive across the board. For our requirements, AWS would have been the most expensive, GCP the least expensive and Azure was in the middle. Plus, if you #Autoscale frequently with large deltas, note that Azure and GCP have per minute billing, where AWS bills you per hour. We also applied for the #Startup programs with all three providers, and this is where Azure shined. While AWS and GCP for startups would have covered us for about one year of infrastructure costs, Azure Sponsorship would cover about two years of CodeFactor's hosting costs. Moreover, Azure Team was terrific - I felt that they wanted to work with us where for AWS and GCP we were just another startup.

        In summary, we were leaning towards GCP. GCP's advantages in containerization, automation toolset, #Devops mindset, and pricing were the driving factors there. Nevertheless, we could not say no to Azure's financial incentives and a strong sense of partnership and support throughout the process.

        Bottom line is, IAAS offerings with AWS, Azure, and GCP are evolving fast. At CodeFactor, we aim to be platform agnostic where it is practical and retain the flexibility to cherry-pick the best products across providers.

        See more
        Michal Nowak

        In a couple of recent projects we had an opportunity to try out the new Serverless approach to building web applications. It wasn't necessarily a question if we should use any particular vendor but rather "if" we can consider serverless a viable option for building apps. Obviously our goal was also to get a feel for this technology and gain some hands-on experience.

        We did consider AWS Lambda, Firebase from Google as well as Azure Functions. Eventually we went with AWS Lambdas.

        PROS
        • No servers to manage (obviously!)
        • Limited fixed costs – you pay only for used time
        • Automated scaling and balancing
        • Automatic failover (or, at this level of abstraction, no failover problem at all)
        • Security easier to provide and audit
        • Low overhead at the start (with the certain level of knowledge)
        • Short time to market
        • Easy handover - deployment coupled with code
        • Perfect choice for lean startups with fast-paced iterations
        • Augmentation for the classic cloud, server(full) approach
        CONS
        • Not much know-how and best practices available about structuring the code and projects on the market
        • Not suitable for complex business logic due to the risk of producing highly coupled code
        • Cost difficult to estimate (helpful tools: serverlesscalc.com)
        • Difficulty in migration to other platforms (Vendor lock⚠️)
        • Little engineers with experience in serverless on the job market
        • Steep learning curve for engineers without any cloud experience

        More details are on our blog: https://evojam.com/blog/2018/12/5/should-you-go-serverless-meet-the-benefits-and-flaws-of-new-wave-of-cloud-solutions I hope it helps 🙌 & I'm curious of your experiences.

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        Google Cloud Functions logo

        Google Cloud Functions

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        A serverless environment to build and connect cloud services
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        PROS OF GOOGLE CLOUD FUNCTIONS
        • 7
          Serverless Applications
        • 5
          Its not AWS
        • 4
          Simplicity
        • 3
          Free Tiers and Trainging
        • 2
          Simple config with GitLab CI/CD
        • 1
          Built-in Webhook trigger
        • 1
          Typescript Support
        • 1
          Blaze, pay as you go
        • 1
          Customer Support
        CONS OF GOOGLE CLOUD FUNCTIONS
        • 1
          Node.js only
        • 0
          Typescript Support
        • 0
          Blaze, pay as you go

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        Kestas Barzdaitis
        Entrepreneur & Engineer · | 16 upvotes · 764.9K views

        CodeFactor being a #SAAS product, our goal was to run on a cloud-native infrastructure since day one. We wanted to stay product focused, rather than having to work on the infrastructure that supports the application. We needed a cloud-hosting provider that would be reliable, economical and most efficient for our product.

        CodeFactor.io aims to provide an automated and frictionless code review service for software developers. That requires agility, instant provisioning, autoscaling, security, availability and compliance management features. We looked at the top three #IAAS providers that take up the majority of market share: Amazon's Amazon EC2 , Microsoft's Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

        AWS has been available since 2006 and has developed the most extensive services ant tools variety at a massive scale. Azure and GCP are about half the AWS age, but also satisfied our technical requirements.

        It is worth noting that even though all three providers support Docker containerization services, GCP has the most robust offering due to their investments in Kubernetes. Also, if you are a Microsoft shop, and develop in .NET - Visual Studio Azure shines at integration there and all your existing .NET code works seamlessly on Azure. All three providers have serverless computing offerings (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions). Additionally, all three providers have machine learning tools, but GCP appears to be the most developer-friendly, intuitive and complete when it comes to #Machinelearning and #AI.

        The prices between providers are competitive across the board. For our requirements, AWS would have been the most expensive, GCP the least expensive and Azure was in the middle. Plus, if you #Autoscale frequently with large deltas, note that Azure and GCP have per minute billing, where AWS bills you per hour. We also applied for the #Startup programs with all three providers, and this is where Azure shined. While AWS and GCP for startups would have covered us for about one year of infrastructure costs, Azure Sponsorship would cover about two years of CodeFactor's hosting costs. Moreover, Azure Team was terrific - I felt that they wanted to work with us where for AWS and GCP we were just another startup.

        In summary, we were leaning towards GCP. GCP's advantages in containerization, automation toolset, #Devops mindset, and pricing were the driving factors there. Nevertheless, we could not say no to Azure's financial incentives and a strong sense of partnership and support throughout the process.

        Bottom line is, IAAS offerings with AWS, Azure, and GCP are evolving fast. At CodeFactor, we aim to be platform agnostic where it is practical and retain the flexibility to cherry-pick the best products across providers.

        See more
        Tim Nolet

        AWS Lambda Serverless Amazon CloudWatch Azure Functions Google Cloud Functions Node.js

        In the last year or so, I moved all Checkly monitoring workloads to AWS Lambda. Here are some stats:

        • We run three core functions in all AWS regions. They handle API checks, browser checks and setup / teardown scripts. Check our docs to find out what that means.
        • All functions are hooked up to SNS topics but can also be triggered directly through AWS SDK calls.
        • The busiest function is a plumbing function that forwards data to our database. It is invoked anywhere between 7000 and 10.000 times per hour with an average duration of about 179 ms.
        • We run separate dev and test versions of each function in each region.

        Moving all this to AWS Lambda took some work and considerations. The blog post linked below goes into the following topics:

        • Why Lambda is an almost perfect match for SaaS. Especially when you're small.
        • Why I don't use a "big" framework around it.
        • Why distributed background jobs triggered by queues are Lambda's raison d'être.
        • Why monitoring & logging is still an issue.

        https://blog.checklyhq.com/how-i-made-aws-lambda-work-for-my-saas/

        See more
        Cloud Functions for Firebase logo

        Cloud Functions for Firebase

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        Run your mobile backend code without managing servers
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        PROS OF CLOUD FUNCTIONS FOR FIREBASE
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          Up and running
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          Multi-region
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          Affordable
        CONS OF CLOUD FUNCTIONS FOR FIREBASE
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          Eugene Cheah

          For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;

          We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.

          If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...

          1. <5ms CPU time limit
          2. Incompatible with express.js
          3. one script limitation per domain

          Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)

          For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost

          More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article

          See more
          Aliadoc Team

          In #Aliadoc, we're exploring the crowdfunding option to get traction before launch. We are building a SaaS platform for website design customization.

          For the Admin UI and website editor we use React and we're currently transitioning from a Create React App setup to a custom one because our needs have become more specific. We use CloudFlare as much as possible, it's a great service.

          For routing dynamic resources and proxy tasks to feed websites to the editor we leverage CloudFlare Workers for improved responsiveness. We use Firebase for our hosting needs and user authentication while also using several Cloud Functions for Firebase to interact with other services along with Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage, but also the Real Time Database is on the radar for collaborative website editing.

          We generally hate configuration but honestly because of the stage of our project we lack resources for doing heavy sysops work. So we are basically just relying on Serverless technologies as much as we can to do all server side processing.

          Visual Studio Code definitively makes programming a much easier and enjoyable task, we just love it. We combine it with Bitbucket for our source code control needs.

          See more
          Apex logo

          Apex

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          Serverless Architecture with AWS Lambda
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              Google Cloud Run logo

              Google Cloud Run

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              Run stateless HTTP containers on a fully managed environment or in your own GKE cluster
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              PROS OF GOOGLE CLOUD RUN
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                HTTPS endpoints
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                Fully managed
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                Pay per use
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                Concurrency: multiple requests sent to each container
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                Deploy containers
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                Serverless
              • 6
                Custom domains with auto SSL
              • 4
                "Invoke IAM permission" to manage authentication
              • 0
                Cons
              CONS OF GOOGLE CLOUD RUN
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                I use Google Cloud Run because it's like bring your own docker image to Google Cloud Functions.

                I use it for building Dash Apps

                It creates a nice url for web apps, and I see it being the evolution of serverless if GCP can scale this up.

                My Real-Time Python App Example

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                What are the best options to host a Spring Boot application that acts as a receiver and publisher from Google Cloud Pub/Sub. I am using Google App Engine to do that, but there is Google Cloud Dataflow and Google Cloud Run that can be used. Which is the best option that can be used for this purpose and also that can handle the failover scenarios as well. Thanks!

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