Inovation regarding FaaS comes from BigTechs. I wish we had more OpenSource FaaS solutions, albeit OpenFaas amazing achievements still lacks more robust ecosystem.
It is literally "worth it" for companies much smaller than Meta due to the reduced infra management costs plus increased hardware utilization. A few hundred unique VMs is a boatload of work (even if you distribute it down to the dev teams), and most of those VMs will be sitting idle most of the time, just burning electricity to keep the RAM on.
But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS to run your serverless functions, right?
If you have a big enough SRE team to manage your serverless stack, economy of scale means that development teams utilising these can reduce their infra management costs. It is about the ratio of engineers utilising the stack compared to those that need to maintain it.
> But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS
No, you would have a boatload of generic worker VMs that could all be spun up as needed (autoscaled) from a common base image and deleted without any need to preserve state. Effectively, you're managing one VM image, which can be rolled out across your entire fleet very quickly and with zero downtime / disruption. This is even less disruption than with k8s because FAAS design is fundamentally short-lived processes, resulting in more automation (less work) for your SRE / VM team.
As far as I am aware there is no easy to set up open source FAAS framework. At least with Kubernetes there are a million and one tutorials, and there is a large support community.
The pendulum has swung (is swinging?) for many companies back to on-prem for cost savings. Self-hosted FAAS allows your developers to retain the abstraction over the compute platform (a step beyond what containers provide), and grants those running the physical infra significant flexibility in managing it. It's also arguably less complex than k8s for basically everyone, if your use case supports short-lived functions.
> The pendulum has swung (is swinging?) for many companies back to on-prem for cost savings.
This is only true of very large companies, so it doesn't change anything about this thread, which was saying that FaaS only makes sense if you're a public cloud or a large company with many on-prem servers.
FaaS could be sharing your hardware at a function level inside the JVMs or whatever you are running, rather than at the VM or hypervisor level. You can (potentially) get much better elasticity and utilisation?
Software already shares hardware at the function level. You have far more visibility and control over this within your program than you do when you add an unnecessary layer of abstraction like FaaS.
Think more about the name: Function as a Service.
Why do you need to serve yourself your own functions? It makes sense only in the context of a cloud provider that's trying to solve the problem of underutilized resources used across many customers.
Yes, but I'm just confused because saying "Why isn't there an open source FaaS for on prem that shares hardware" makes no sense. At that point, you're just talking about regular coding with functions. Unless there's something I'm missing.
