Top 10 Open Source Serverless Platforms

Are you looking for Open Source Serverless Platforms? Here is an in-depth tutorial explaining ten of the best serverless providers regarding features and pricing structure.

The use of open-source serverless platforms has dramatically increased in the past few years. According to a forecast by Verified Market Research, the market size of serverless architecture will reach 36.84 billion USD by 2028. Its value was only 7.29 billion USD in 2020. The major reason behind the popularity of open-source serverless platforms is their magical benefits.

Therefore, this article presents one of the top benefits of serverless platforms. This article will also discuss the dominating serverless vendors with their core features.

Benefits of Serverless Platforms

Below are some advantages of serverless computing.

Easier Deployment

An open-source serverless platform is the best option for coherent app deployment. Such a medium of app deployment is efficient and time-saving simultaneously. There will be no infrastructure construction to delay the process of application deployment. Running application on a serverless structure is relatively easy.

Additionally, developers no longer have to manage production systems to focus on the feature set of applications. This helps them to invest more time in stabilizing their applications for a better user experience.

A complete user experience compiles accessibility, convenience, and value. Now, it has become easy to provide your users with such supreme values through serverless frameworks. On that note, it is also hassle-free to ascertain identical configurations regarding the development.

Serverless frameworks have made it highly convenient to exclude any uncertain bumps when the application goes live. Developers can comprehensively test and debug the application, keeping credibility and reliability on top regarding the user experience.

Cost-Effectiveness

Developers can cut down a significant cost of their project’s internal infrastructure by outsourcing databases. This is where serverless frameworks such as Function as a Service (FaaS) come into action. You basically aren’t responsible for data management or the server’s responsibility. In addition, these assiduous tasks can suck up great human resources too.

Setting up your own server can intermingle with your actual product goal. It will also exhaust your financial situation as a starter. Therefore, outsourcing your database and going serverless is just a supreme idea. Developers are more likely to concentrate on the actual goal cost.

This helps them achieve their business goals without keeping them in budget restraints. Anyhow, the budget requirements solely depend upon your personal case and use. So, there is no specified cost for your product case even when you ought to function serverless.

Hence, you can just try holding a complete analysis of your project details to specify your leverage over finance.

Improved Scalability

You can scale your product to a desirable elasticity with serverless frameworks. Applications that are built upon specific servers can crash or become vulnerable if user response spikes. Therefore, serverless frameworks are the best solution-call to this problem.

Besides, announcing a specific server requirement for your product’s architecture is always tricky. Nobody knew that Amazon would become this influential or popular in the consumer market. So, maximum scalability assurance is mandatory for the future of solution products.

For instance, your application is now successful after an entire year. This application under serverless support has exceptional growth potential. Serverless architectures are great at housing growth when an application’s usage is rising.

Focus on UX

It is crucial to bring a fine UX (user experience) to your application users. Your app users will indeed have no real concerns with the backend coding and app infrastructure. They will just be expecting a complete and convenient user experience.

Applications are developed to add value to the concerned audience. So they serve various possible purposes. Your application’s frontend has to be purposeful and enchanting to the audience. Developers can ingrain various feasible tweaks to bring out the best product.

They can mainly target the actual purpose an application serves. That assists developers in tailoring the efforts toward the natural purpose/goal or intent. Hence, they can provide a unified experience to the audience. Going with the best serverless framework will give you more freedom to relocate the right resources for the best user experience.

Therefore, it will help you generate more positive feedback at the end of the day.

Better Latency

In a serverless architecture, it is easy to engage users globally. They usually encompass access points on a global scale, unlike traditional servers. For instance, you are hosting a server from a specific area. A user who uses your app from another place will request signals the entire distance.

It can translate into an unavoidable delay whenever a user engages your application using a traditional server. With serverless support, there are no delays whenever users request signals using your applications. As a matter of fact, serverless nodes are present in almost every region.

On a signal request from a serverless architecture, the signal will no longer have to travel a long distance. However, serverless support can also result in a cold start. It is only when your application’s Function is dormant. You can avoid this trouble by keeping your app functions in an active state.

Top 10 Open Source Serverless Platforms

1. Back4app

Back4app is an open source serverless cloud platform that commenced its journey in 2015. It was created for programming teams to build a flexible, scalable, and secure backend for apps. Its dashboard resembles a spreadsheet, making it easy for developers to generate.

Moreover, it helps you change and sync application data without writing complex code. Similarly, Back4app’s Parse dashboard allows users to import or export JSON/CSV files with a single click.

Features

Relational Database Schema & Queries — It offers a fully relational database schema that can be used to store and query data. The schema consists of tables, columns, and rows. Each table contains one or more rows with a unique key value.

Cloud Code Functions — It allows you to write custom functions in JavaScript that operate on the server-side of your application. These functions are executed whenever an event occurs within your application. Likewise, when an item is created or updated in the database. Users can deploy serverless functions very easily.

Real-Time Queries — Its queries allow you to access data in real-time with no delay between updating the data in the database and being displayed on the screen.

GraphQL & REST APIs — Besides, it offers an easy-to-use GraphQL API that can be easily integrated into any existing application or website. The REST API is also available if you prefer it over GraphQL. You can switch between the two APIs at any time without having to change anything in your codebase!

Other features – Command line interface, notifications, web hosting, etc.

Pricing

It comes with four inclusive pricing criteria; free, MVP, pay-as-you-go and dedicated. Its MVP version comes for $25/per month, and the dedicated version with $500/ per month, but both have different features.

For example, the shared version featured daily backup & data recovery and 24/7 monitoring. At the same time, the dedicated version comes with dedicated VMs (guaranteed RAM, CPU) and advanced security features.

2. Parse

Parse is a serverless open source platform that allows you to store, sync, and query data. It works as FaaS and has a REST API so that you can use it with any programming language.

With more than 35k stars and 16k forks on GitHub, it is also famous among users with the name of Parse Platform.

Features

Realtime Database — It offers real-time data synchronization between devices and the cloud. In addition, Parse allows users to write code once and run it anywhere on the web or mobile device without managing any infrastructure.

User Authentication — It supports user logins via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, GitHub, and email accounts. You can create secure access controls for each user with Parse Serverless Platform’s role-based access control (RBAC) feature.

Push Notifications — Your application can send push notifications to subscribers using the Parse. This allows you to send alerts and other messages to individual users or groups anytime.

User-Friendly Dashboard — You can use Parse Dashboard to manage your data model and application settings through an easy-to-use web interface. It permits you to edit database tables, add columns to existing tables, create relationships between tables, and more.

Pricing

You can utilize Parse services without paying anything.

3. Apache OpenWhisk

Apache OpenWhisk is one of the best serverless frameworks that confers diverse functions. Yes, it is an execution engine that allows you to run code without having to provision or manage servers.

It allows you to build applications in any programming language and host them on any cloud platform. This means you can use it to create applications that run on-premise, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.

Features

Event-Driven Computing — It is executed in response to events, such as an HTTP request or database change. This eliminates the need for continuous maintenance and administration of virtual machines (VMs) or containers that execute long-running jobs.

Fully Managed Service — Developers do not need to provision or manage servers, which makes Apache OpenWhisk ideal for organizations with limited resources or large amounts of data whose needs are constantly changing.

Open API Interface — The API allows you to create functions using code written in any language or framework that supports JavaScript execution. You can also use popular tools like Docker and Kubernetes for containerized functions and multi-cloud deployment flexibility.

Code Execution — Teams can execute code using scripting languages like JavaScript and Python, Java, Go, or C++ via Docker containers. The platform also natively supports any programming language with an HTTP/REST interface, such as Node.js or Ruby on Rails.

Act as an Extension — You can use OpenWhisk as part of a giant application stack by integrating it with other systems like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions.

Scalable — It is built on top of Apache YARN, allowing you to run thousands of functions in parallel. It also has built-in fault tolerance so that when things do go wrong, they will recover automatically.

Pricing

Unless otherwise specified, all packages created by the ASF are implicitly licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

4. AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify is another trusted name when it comes to the best open-source serverless platforms. It allows you to use your favorite language and libraries to develop a serverless application.

Not only that, it provides a solid foundation for building highly scalable applications and permits you to create custom features on top of it.

Features

Authentication — It provides a standard interface for managing different types of user identities. This includes support for Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cognito user pools. Moreover, it also allows you to integrate with other identity providers such as Okta, OneLogin, Ping Identity, Microsoft Account, etc.

Notifications — You can also send them from AWS Lambda functions when certain events occur within your application or system.

Analytics — Amazon Pinpoint is a marketing analytics service that helps businesses track the performance of their advertising campaigns using analytics dashboards and reports. It integrates with AWS Amplify to deliver user data from your app to pinpoint.

Pricing

It comes with 2 static web hosting services. The one is called Free Tier. The other one is Pay As You Go.

5. Fission

Fission is an open-source serverless platform for building and managing serverless functions. It allows developers to focus on building applications instead of managing infrastructure.

Indeed, Fission makes it easy to create and administer functions with a simple CLI and then deploy them across multiple cloud providers. It is a framework that offers a set of libraries that can be used to build serverless applications.

Features

Cross-Platform — It is a serverless platform that allows you to run your functions across multiple clouds and devices. This means you can deploy your tasks on any cloud provider or device.

Wide Language Support — This means you can use all the tools, libraries, and frameworks you’re already familiar with when building your application. It backs Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, C# and many other languages.

Easy to get started with — it has made getting started easy because it pre-built some standard functions that you might want to use in your application (like authentication), so you don’t have to write them yourself. This is documented on our website so you can get started quickly.

Storage — It has storage backends for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage. You can use these storage backends to store and retrieve large amounts of data from your application.

6. IronFunctions

IronFunctions is an open-source serverless platform that works as a Function as a Service (FaaS) platform. It is scripted in the Go language. Luckily, it owns a Slack community that guides novices on everything about this serverless framework.

Features

Open-Source — The platform functions as an open-source service and can be found on Github. You can see under the hood and contribute to the project if you want to!

Cloud-Native — You can also run on any cloud provider, so there is no vendor lock-in. Yes, it gives you portability across different environments.

Functions Are Immutable — When operations run in IronFunctions, they cannot be changed after being deployed to production. This helps prevent errors from being introduced into running code by mistake.

Language Support — It supports many languages, such as C#, Python, and JavaScript. So, developers have freedom over what language they choose to use while building their applications!

7. Fn Project

The Fn Project is based on-premise serverless and API gateway for building web and mobile applications.

It allows you to develop your functions and deploy existing processes from other third-party providers like AWS Lambda.

The Fn project is open source and available on GitHub. You can find more information on how to use it in the documentation.

Features

Flexibility — You can write your serverless Function using any language you want, including JavaScript and Python.

Deployment in Seconds — The first thing that makes Fn Project Serverless Functions Open Source different from other frameworks is its fast deployment speed.

Support for Multiple Languages — Another great feature of the Fn Project is its support for various languages. Developers can use their preferred programming language to build applications that run on AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.

Easy Integration — Fn Project supports integration with third-party services such as, Redis, and PostgreSQL through plugins. This means you can easily add these storage options to your applications without manually writing any code or configuration files for them.

Run Microservices — You can run microservices in a distributed system with minimal overhead. It allows you to build applications without worrying about infrastructure management or scaling.

8. Kubeless

Kubeless is a Serverless Functions Open Source and built on top of Kubernetes. It provides automatic function deployment, monitoring, and management of event-driven applications.

Kubeless allows you to write your functions in any language that can be compiled down to a binary, including Go, Python, PHP and many other languages.

Features

Client Application — It provides client libraries for Java, Python, Node.js, and Ruby. These libraries help developers build applications that interact with Kubeless APIs.

Web Server — This serverless platform supports web servers such as Nginx and Apache2. Developers can use these web servers to expose their services to outside users.

Security Token Services (STS) — The STS Service provides an easy way for users to obtain security tokens from STS providers.

Database — With this framework, you can get database support from Amazon Web Services. Mainly, you can utilize AWS DynamoDB.

9. OpenFaaS

OpenFaaS is another reliable serverless framework for building, testing, and deploying functions in a few clicks. It includes a web-based UI with auto-scaling features and supports multiple languages and frameworks.

You can use OpenFaaS to run any code in any environment. You can deploy your functions to any cloud provider or run them locally on your laptop.

Features

Run any Code — You can use any programming language with OpenFaaS, from Node.js to Golang. The only requirement is that the code is packaged as a Docker container.

Easy to Connect — It is easy to connect your functions with other services like databases or message queues. It uses its Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model that allows you to run code without managing servers or infrastructure.

Easy to Use — It is also designed to be easy to use and understand. It’s built with Docker, Kubernetes, and API-driven functions in mind. It also supports other container solutions like Rancher and Nomad.

Serverless Functions — OpenFaaS allows you to run functions in any language, including Golang and Python 3, on Kubernetes or Swarm clusters in cloud providers such as AWS and Azure.

10. Kuzzle

Kuzzle is an open-source serverless platform for developing and deploying applications on any cloud.

It includes an API gateway, a database, real-time-query subscription, search engine, security layer, and plugins. Kuzzle can be used by developers to build new applications or to extend existing systems with serverless features.

You can conveniently utilize this cloud computing solution for your smart city, logistics and housing projects. It gives greats in these fields.

Features

Database — Kuzzle provides a real-time database subscription. Other databases can be added with plugins. This feature allows users to store data simultaneously in a central location accessible by multiple devices.

Actual Time Subscriptions — Real-time query subscriptions allow users to query their data in real-time without polling or waiting for results through an API call.

Security Layer — It provides a security layer for application developers to quickly build, test and deploy their applications.

Search Engine — It allows you to index all your documents into an ElasticSearch instance running in the cloud with minimal configuration. Moreover, less setup time is required from developers so that they can focus on building their applications.

Plugins — It has a plugin API that allows developers to add new features to the platform.

Multi-Tenancy — Developers can create multiple tenants on Kuzzle and use them for different projects.

Pricing

Kuzzle offers three open-source solutions: Kuzzle PaaS, Kuzzle IoT and Kuzzle Backend. Although you can contact the sales team to get actual quotes but its technical support services start from €500/month.

Conclusion

Though open-source serverless platforms provide numerous benefits to development teams, large enterprises or SMEs, it is hard to find accurate details about them.

However, this guide presents one of the top serverless platforms with an unbiased analysis. Hopefully, these details will assist you in picking the right solution for your upcoming venture.

FAQ