X
Innovation

TriggerMesh brings AWS Lambda serverless computing to Kubernetes

Amazon Web Services' Lambda is a powerful serverless computing tool, but it's AWS only. TriggerMesh wants to expand its reach beyond AWS.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Serverless computing's poster child software is Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Lambda. It only has one little problem: You can use it on AWS. If you're wedded to AWS, that's not a problem, but if you want to use it on another cloud platform or as part of a hybrid cloud, you're out of luck. Until now.

TriggerMesh, an open-source multicloud serverless management company, is seeking to enable you to run Lambda functions on Knative-enabled clusters and serverless clouds. Knative is a set of Google's open-source Kubernetes middleware components. It's used for orchestrating source-to-container workflows, auto-scale workloads, route and manage network traffic, and binding running services to event ecosystems.

SEE: Prepare for serverless computing (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

TriggerMesh's serverless management platform for functions-as-a-service (FaaS) is designed to enable developers to deploy and manage functions on the TriggerMesh Cloud or in their own data center. TriggerMesh's cross-cloud event bus allows users to trigger functions from event sources from any cloud.

lambda-architecture1.png

What TriggerMesh is doing here is using AWS Lambda Custom Runtime API with the Knative Build system to run Lambda on top of Knative/Kubernetes clusters. This new open-source program is called TriggerMesh Knative Lambda Runtime (KLR -- pronounced "clear").  

Also: Amazon Web Services: A cheat sheet TechRepublic

The long-term goal is to enable you to run Lambda functions on any Knative-enabled cloud. In the short-term, you'll be able to run Lambda on Google Cloud Platform.

KLR provides a consistent execution environment for Lambda on Knative. In the future, triggers will also be available to route events to the appropriate function via Knative eventing.

"We believe that the key to enabling cloud native applications, is to provide true portability and communication across disparate cloud infrastructure," said TriggerMesh co-founder Mark Hinkle in a statement.

Hinkle's right. If the project is successful, this will further enable the modern Kubernetes hybrid-cloud model.

See inside an Amazon fulfillment center where many of the workers don't get paid

Related stories:

Editorial standards