Introducing ‘Pivotal Function Service’ (alpha): an open, Kubernetes based, multi-cloud serverless framework for developer workloads

Last week, Pivotal announced the ‘Pivotal Function Service’ (PFS) in alpha. Until now, Pivotal has focussed on making open-source tools for enterprise developers but has lacked a serverless component to its suite of offerings. This aspect changes with the launch of PFS.

PFS is designed to work both on-premise and in the cloud in a cloud-native fashion while being open source. It is a Kubernetes-based, multi-cloud function service offering customers a single platform for all their workloads on any cloud.

Developers can deploy and operate databases, batch jobs, web APIs, legacy apps, event-driven functions, and many other workloads the same way everywhere, all because of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform. This is comprised of Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), and now, Pivotal Function Service (PFS).

Providing the same developer and operator experience on every public or cloud, PFS is event-oriented with built-in components that make it easy to architect loosely coupled, streaming systems. Its buildpacks simplify packaging and are operator-friendly providing a secure, low-touch experience running atop Kubernetes.

The fact that Pivotal can work on any cloud as an open product, makes it stand apart from cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which provide similar services that run exclusively on their clouds.

Features of PFS

PFS is built on Knative, which is an open-source project led by Google that simplifies how developers deploy functions atop Kubernetes and Istio.

PFS runs on Kubernetes and Istio and helps customers take advantage of the benefits of Kubernetes and Istio, abstracting away the complexity of both technologies.

PFS allows customers to use familiar, container-based workflows for serverless scenarios.

PFS Event Sources helps customers create feeds from external event sources such as GitHub webhooks, blob stores, and database services.

PFS can be connected easily with popular message brokers such as Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, and RabbitMQ; that provide a reliable backing services for messaging channels.

Pivotal has continued to develop the riff invoker model in PFS, to help developers deliver both streaming and non-streaming function code using simple, language-idiomatic interfaces.

The new package includes several key components for developers, including a native eventing ability that provides a way to build rich event triggers to call whatever functionality a developer requires within a Kubernetes-based environment. This is particularly important for companies that deploy a hybrid use case to manage the events across on-premise and cloud in a seamless way.

Head over to Pivotal’s official Blog to know more about this announcement.

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