Self-Hosted FaaS with Apache OpenWhisk

Serverless has revolutionized cloud computing, and we have talked about a number of vendors and technology platforms in the previous chapters. The central theme of all serverless platforms has been Function as a Service (FaaS) as the coordinating and controlling technology. Though AWS pioneered FaaS and other cloud vendors caught on, it shouldn’t be limited to a few cloud vendor offerings. Even a single technology platform such as Kubernetes should not be the only way to deploy serverless or FaaS, even though it is open source and vendor-neutral. There have been multiple initiatives to create a vendor-neutral and platform-agnostic serverless platform, some more successful than others. Apache OpenWhisk has evolved as one of the top platforms of this kind.

OpenWhisk started off as a serverless project in IBM in 2015, codenamed whisk, shortly after AWS Lambda was announced. While the fundamental idea was to power an IBM Cloud FaaS offering...