OpenWhiskがApacheソフトウェアのディプロマを取得

サーバーレスプラットフォームは当初IBMによって開発されましたが、現在はますます複雑な環境に入っています。The OpenWhisk open source serverless platform hit graduation status as a Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. The designation comes as the serverless ecosystem continues its rapid evolution in meeting the production needs of organizations. The OpenWhisk project itself was initially born out of IBM, which donated its beta-level code into the Apache Incubator project in late 2016. IBM was using that codebase to support functions running on its IBM Cloud. Matt Rutkowski, CTO for serverless technologies and advocacy at IBM, explained in an email that the graduation status shows that the OpenWhisk community is able to self-manage and govern itself. It also provides developers with more confidence “that the code and its releases have been produced to assure the code’s provenance and security which can be used in production settings under the open, well-understood Apache 2 license,” Rutkowski added. The graduation status is analogous to the process used for open source projects at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). OpenWhisk is primarily used today to support container frameworks using the containerd container runtime interface (CRI) to run on Kubernetes using Helm charts. It also supports the Apache Mesos container orchestration framework. Rutkowski noted that OpenWhisk has found a niche within the edge function-as-a-service (FaaS) computing space and supports service provider interface plug-ins for logging, monitoring, and data storage. OpenWhisk differentiates itself in what is an increasingly complex serverless space by being designed from the beginning to support functional workloads and functional programming models. Rutkowski noted that this means its codebase has “benefitted from being developed and well-tested in the open over several years and is hardened by exposure in actual production environments and real-world use cases ranging from IoT and edge to analytics and AI on platforms like IBM Cloud Functions.” Rutkowski said the OpenWhisk community is working toward integration possibilities with other serverless technologies like the Kubernetes-based Knative project, the Google-developed Tekton continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, and the Microsoft developed Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) platform. “Many of these communities explore interesting new and non-traditional use cases for using functions within workflows or heterogenous applications,” Rutkowski noted. “We would love to be able to understand and support them with OpenWhisk in the most secure and performant way possible.” One move the OpenWhisk community has already made was in creating a plug-in for the Serverless Framework platform developed by Serverless. That company just this week launched an updated version of its Serverless Framework platform that includes deeper lifecycle management control. This includes real-time monitoring, testing, secrets management, and security for applications running in its serverless environment. As for the continued maturation of the serverless space, Rutkowski said that the ecosystem was still in its early days. This has led to the development of different platforms in either open communities or proprietary ones that are tied to specific cloud platforms. However, he acknowledged that at some point it would be in the best interest of at least the open communities to work closer together to ease the use of serverless in production environments. “It is my hope that these open communities will work together to decide what each does best and what role they play in a serverless technology stack, develop standards enabling hybrid deployments, and consumption via standardized APIs,” Rutkowski said.