9 ms·

Pivotal launches serverless framework that works across clouds and on-prem

117 points by tpurves 8y ago

mchmarny 8y ago
It’s exciting to see ecosystem build commercial products using Knative (https://github.com/knative https://github.com/knative). The developers on those platforms benefit from increased portability. Congratulations to the riff team behind the new Pivotal Function Service offering
yodon 8y ago
From an economic perspective, using a service like Pivotal feels like placing a bet that the pricing difference between cloud providers will be higher that the cost of paying for Pivotal's support plan (I know, open source, but if you reach a scale where these things matter enough that you care about the cost to switch clouds you are probably at the scale where you find yourself paying for Redhat and etc support plans). As cool as "cloud agnostic" sounds, paying any real tax to achieve it probably exceeds the long term price differential between major cloud providers. The major clouds sell commodities, recognize that they sell commodities, and they operate as low margin large scale providers. Over time the pricing differences have to average out to about zero, otherwise the market would abandon the always-more-TCO-costly provider (which would cause them to lower their margins to recapture the higher total earnings).
- wmf 8y ago
  I suspect people aren't paying for Pivotal stuff to save money but because they aren't competent enough to use public cloud directly or they have unlimited risk aversion.
- richards 8y ago
  Honestly, this rarely seems to come down to cloud pricing considerations. Rather, the goal for most shops who choose something like PCF is to (a) simplify onboarding and ongoing work of devs since they don't need to learn the nuances of each cloud IaaS, (b) stripe a single ops model across each infrastructure pool, which matters since no enterprise of size is using only one. People buy because they struggle to ship, and PCF helps these big companies put their focus back onto shipping software, not where or how it runs. Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.
- Proven 8y ago
  > From an economic perspective, using a service like Pivotal feels like placing a bet that the pricing difference between cloud providers will be higher that the cost of paying for Pivotal's support plan Wrong. The idea of using 3rd party orchestration services will increase the ROI or lower the TCO through things like the ability to run the same container or function anywhere, including on prem (which is rarely more expensive than the cloud, by the way). Apache is free, but if you run IIS on-premises, Apache on Amazon may not necessarily save you money. That's why Azure is doing well and others (such as Pivotal) may be able to carve out a niche for themselves too. And it's also wrong to say that major cloud providers operate on low margins.
mothsonasloth 8y ago
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is terrible. I am having a terrible time working with PAS. The use case of PCF is weak especially when Kubernetes does everything it can do. It just sells enterprise fluff to "architects" in suits who haven't touched code in years and are so far from the reality of Devs working day to day. The time it took me to migrate a Java spring boot service from AWS to GCP was around a day. Getting it to work with Pivotals way of doing things was more like a week. We are now starting to do some of our infrastructure on Kubernetes, much less headache. If anyone wants more info feel free to ask. My post might seem angry but as a developer I know better than the execs.
- codingminds 8y ago
  That's a very interesting point for me. Our company is in discussion with Pivotal to use PAS or PKS on prem. Do you have a specific example or something similar what was the problem ? I've only seen the slides which should sell the products to OPS guys and the idea looked promising.
  - mothsonasloth 8y ago
    I can only comment on PAS but the main issues I've experienced are: I have to login to PCF to check environments or add services to bind to an app. The CF cli is not very easy to understand compared to aws eb cli or herokus toolbelt The login screen says "email" but you actually have to enter your user ID Devops become your enemies, especially if they lock down PCF environments. I don't want to beg for a redis tile. PCF eats a lot of ram from our virtual servers. The PCF support is layered with different urgency levels, most of the time they ignore you or are slow to respond Basically I think it's a tool that gets in the way of developers and gives headaches to the platform team. However my company signed a contract with them, so we're tied in for a year.... I might quit before then
    - codingminds 8y ago
      thanks for the answer
    - 8y ago
polskibus 8y ago
I wonder how does Pivotal new framework compare to OpenWhisk? https://openwhisk.apache.org/ https://openwhisk.apache.org/
- fuball63 8y ago
  I thought it was weird that they were claiming to be the first open cloud agnostic serverless provider.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Project riff most closely compares to OpenWhisk and in fact both riff and OpenWhisk contributors work together on Knative. Of the two, riff has the advantage that it came along at the right time to be based directly on Knative without to be "ported", so to speak. PFS might be more fairly to commercial plans announced by other vendors to repackage OpenWhisk. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, though not directly on PFS.
mohdmasd 8y ago
Azure functions is also a serverless framework that works across clouds and on-prem.
- GordonS 8y ago
  I seem to recall Microsoft actually open sourced it
exabrial 8y ago
My issue with Spring is it became what it was supposed to replace. Originally, we flocked to Spring because IBM WebSphere and WebLogic were slow and bloated. Now Spring has classes that are 72+ characters long and an inconsistent programming model. I really like CDI, which grew from ideas hatched in Spring and Guice. Microprofile is built on top of it as offers standardized, mutiple competing implementations, modular, interoperable specs.
rorychatt 8y ago
Pivotal haven't launched a serverless framework, they've launched a FaaS(ish) framework. Serverless implies that the management of the underlying infrastructure is owned wholy by a third party, and the only exposure to you is the higher order abstractions, leaving you to only worry about the business logic. This is not that. You still need to water and feed a Pivotal/K8s platform, and those things are awful to run. "What’s interesting about Pivotal’s flavor of serverless, besides the fact that it’s based on open source, is that it has been designed to work both on-prem and in the cloud in a cloud native fashion, hence the Kubernetes-based aspect of it. This is unusual to say the least." This isn't unusual. Every software house seems to be building a dream of hybrid cloud on-top of Kubernetes. Rightscale, Openwhisk, Cisco Cloud Centre, IBM Cloud Private, ServiceNow and others build their sales strategy across cloud mobility. This dream of cross cloud portability needs to die. You either end up: Option A - Leveraging the cloud native logging, storage, networking, database and analytics services, leaving behind only the container layer which is portable. By this stage, you end up having to re-write those parts of the json/yaml/terraform to handle deployments into other clouds ANYWAY. So what's the benefit again? It also encourages you to do stupid things like single account deployments in AWS since federation for these abstraction layers are still very much a pipe dream, significantly increasing the blast radius concern. Option B - You run your own logging, storage, networking, database and analytics services inside the K8s which defeats the entire point of being in the cloud in the first place. Being cloud agnostic is a great pipe dream, but the economics of running an abstraction layer (Pivotal / Openshift / Mesos) vs cost of exit just doesn't add up for 99% of companies. Just use the native FaaS/Data/Analytics.
- jelling 8y ago
  Great analysis. I think of it as avoiding the DevOps explosion and it drives me nuts when I see early stage companies sinking lots of time into getting the perfect setup of what is actually just a cost center. There's likely some strained argument for how this ultimately might benefit the customer but that ROI is a long way off, and if you're still in business.
  - state_less 8y ago
    I'm not so sure. If I were a typical small (startup) company, I'd run on top of Kubernetes with a Postgres backend, some business logic layer in a container and serve some html/js to the browser. It's fast, inexpensive and goes wherever Kubernetes does. Large organizations are a whole other animal. There will be many people entrenched in various ways, each with their own ideas of how things ought to be run. Often guided by technical debt and unique historical needs.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Proven 8y ago
It's (the idea to manage on prem K8S from the cloud) a reaction to 1) Hyperscalers doing hybrid cloud 2) VMware's growingly independent approach to K8S (which I believe will ultimately result in VMware offering "generic" Kubernetes) 3) IBM Redhat becoming more aggressive with their on-prem approach (let's not forget SoftLayer and Redhat OCP can do hybrid K8S on bare metal, without VMware) 4) On-prem-focused vendors like NetApp having announced similar service (NetApp Kubernetes Service, which already works in all hyperscalers and on-Prem NetApp HCI is next) in recent months. Pivotal's on-prem problem (compared to IBM Redhat, NetApp) is problem is they have little on-prem presence, sell no hardware or storage, and need to rely on DellEMC and VMware (which have been great for Pivotal but that was when Pivotal played nice and wasn't helping VMware (and Dell) customers escape to non-VMware based clouds.)
frou_dh 8y ago
On-prem serverless? Stone cold classic.
fuball63 8y ago
One of the reasons I prefer function as a service "FaaS" over "serverless" is because of how useful on demand ephemeral functions can be on premises. The term serverless implies that the main benefit is not having to deal with infrastructure. While that is helpful, setting up a "standard" means of event driven and stateless business logic is useful in its own right. Can you accomplish that with long running processes? Sure, as long as you are disciplined enough to do so.
PaulHoule 8y ago
My take. These kind of things face the problem that they pump entropy out of one part of the system but risk creating more overall. In fact, unless you get all the details right you will end up worse than you started. The "minimal viable product" is not minimal at all if it is going to be viable. For instance I was using Vagrant years ago and realized eventually that I didn't need 80% of what it did and that I hated the DSL. (eg. if it has to support five different ways to build your image, maybe that's a "bad smell" that none of them are good enough) Even though I was using it locally to start, I wound up using it only in AWS and I also used it to stack up systems that I put in front of the public. I wrote my own Java program that would set up a virtual server, networking, all that and write a bash cloud-init script that would run on the machine to set it up, then send a message via SQS when it was ready. If it passed tests, the system could then switch over the elastic IP to the new instance. I looked at the problem of getting it to run on other clouds and it wasn't that bad but it wasn't that good either. In AWS you have to choose a region, availability zone, VPC, subnet, disk types, and a number of details. In some cases those choices could be arbitrary but sometimes you have infrastructure that you have to hook into and you have to match that. In GCS or Azure it's basically the same but it is different, and if you want to support those platforms you have to also embody the differences in the platforms and also the differences between customer's environment. ---- Being involved with software vendors, "hybrid cloud" has a special meaning. My biz dev guy and I picked it up as part of our pitch a few years ago because we needed it. We knew we needed to support customers wherever they were, but of all the messages we tried that was the one that confused customers the most and resonated the least. "On premise" is a special case BTW, because there are many customers who have issues with privacy, security, etc. and they don't have a choice or perceive they have a choice to use public clouds. (eg. Bridgewater thinks that it is better to safer to desktop virtualize into AWS then risk people walking out with laptops, physical destruction of their HQ, etc.)

117 points by tpurves 8y ago

It’s exciting to see ecosystem build commercial products using Knative (https://github.com/knative https://github.com/knative). The developers on those platforms benefit from increased portability. Congratulations to the riff team behind the new Pivotal Function Service offering

yodon 8y ago

From an economic perspective, using a service like Pivotal feels like placing a bet that the pricing difference between cloud providers will be higher that the cost of paying for Pivotal's support plan (I know, open source, but if you reach a scale where these things matter enough that you care about the cost to switch clouds you are probably at the scale where you find yourself paying for Redhat and etc support plans). As cool as "cloud agnostic" sounds, paying any real tax to achieve it probably exceeds the long term price differential between major cloud providers. The major clouds sell commodities, recognize that they sell commodities, and they operate as low margin large scale providers. Over time the pricing differences have to average out to about zero, otherwise the market would abandon the always-more-TCO-costly provider (which would cause them to lower their margins to recapture the higher total earnings).

wmf 8y ago
I suspect people aren't paying for Pivotal stuff to save money but because they aren't competent enough to use public cloud directly or they have unlimited risk aversion.
richards 8y ago
Honestly, this rarely seems to come down to cloud pricing considerations. Rather, the goal for most shops who choose something like PCF is to (a) simplify onboarding and ongoing work of devs since they don't need to learn the nuances of each cloud IaaS, (b) stripe a single ops model across each infrastructure pool, which matters since no enterprise of size is using only one. People buy because they struggle to ship, and PCF helps these big companies put their focus back onto shipping software, not where or how it runs. Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.
Proven 8y ago
> From an economic perspective, using a service like Pivotal feels like placing a bet that the pricing difference between cloud providers will be higher that the cost of paying for Pivotal's support plan Wrong. The idea of using 3rd party orchestration services will increase the ROI or lower the TCO through things like the ability to run the same container or function anywhere, including on prem (which is rarely more expensive than the cloud, by the way). Apache is free, but if you run IIS on-premises, Apache on Amazon may not necessarily save you money. That's why Azure is doing well and others (such as Pivotal) may be able to carve out a niche for themselves too. And it's also wrong to say that major cloud providers operate on low margins.

mothsonasloth 8y ago

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is terrible. I am having a terrible time working with PAS. The use case of PCF is weak especially when Kubernetes does everything it can do. It just sells enterprise fluff to "architects" in suits who haven't touched code in years and are so far from the reality of Devs working day to day. The time it took me to migrate a Java spring boot service from AWS to GCP was around a day. Getting it to work with Pivotals way of doing things was more like a week. We are now starting to do some of our infrastructure on Kubernetes, much less headache. If anyone wants more info feel free to ask. My post might seem angry but as a developer I know better than the execs.

codingminds 8y ago
That's a very interesting point for me. Our company is in discussion with Pivotal to use PAS or PKS on prem. Do you have a specific example or something similar what was the problem ? I've only seen the slides which should sell the products to OPS guys and the idea looked promising.
- mothsonasloth 8y ago
  I can only comment on PAS but the main issues I've experienced are: I have to login to PCF to check environments or add services to bind to an app. The CF cli is not very easy to understand compared to aws eb cli or herokus toolbelt The login screen says "email" but you actually have to enter your user ID Devops become your enemies, especially if they lock down PCF environments. I don't want to beg for a redis tile. PCF eats a lot of ram from our virtual servers. The PCF support is layered with different urgency levels, most of the time they ignore you or are slow to respond Basically I think it's a tool that gets in the way of developers and gives headaches to the platform team. However my company signed a contract with them, so we're tied in for a year.... I might quit before then
  - codingminds 8y ago
    thanks for the answer
  - 8y ago

polskibus 8y ago

I wonder how does Pivotal new framework compare to OpenWhisk? https://openwhisk.apache.org/ https://openwhisk.apache.org/

fuball63 8y ago
I thought it was weird that they were claiming to be the first open cloud agnostic serverless provider.
jacques_chester 8y ago
Project riff most closely compares to OpenWhisk and in fact both riff and OpenWhisk contributors work together on Knative. Of the two, riff has the advantage that it came along at the right time to be based directly on Knative without to be "ported", so to speak. PFS might be more fairly to commercial plans announced by other vendors to repackage OpenWhisk. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, though not directly on PFS.

mohdmasd 8y ago

Azure functions is also a serverless framework that works across clouds and on-prem.

GordonS 8y ago
I seem to recall Microsoft actually open sourced it

exabrial 8y ago

My issue with Spring is it became what it was supposed to replace. Originally, we flocked to Spring because IBM WebSphere and WebLogic were slow and bloated. Now Spring has classes that are 72+ characters long and an inconsistent programming model. I really like CDI, which grew from ideas hatched in Spring and Guice. Microprofile is built on top of it as offers standardized, mutiple competing implementations, modular, interoperable specs.

rorychatt 8y ago

Pivotal haven't launched a serverless framework, they've launched a FaaS(ish) framework. Serverless implies that the management of the underlying infrastructure is owned wholy by a third party, and the only exposure to you is the higher order abstractions, leaving you to only worry about the business logic. This is not that. You still need to water and feed a Pivotal/K8s platform, and those things are awful to run. "What’s interesting about Pivotal’s flavor of serverless, besides the fact that it’s based on open source, is that it has been designed to work both on-prem and in the cloud in a cloud native fashion, hence the Kubernetes-based aspect of it. This is unusual to say the least." This isn't unusual. Every software house seems to be building a dream of hybrid cloud on-top of Kubernetes. Rightscale, Openwhisk, Cisco Cloud Centre, IBM Cloud Private, ServiceNow and others build their sales strategy across cloud mobility. This dream of cross cloud portability needs to die. You either end up: Option A - Leveraging the cloud native logging, storage, networking, database and analytics services, leaving behind only the container layer which is portable. By this stage, you end up having to re-write those parts of the json/yaml/terraform to handle deployments into other clouds ANYWAY. So what's the benefit again? It also encourages you to do stupid things like single account deployments in AWS since federation for these abstraction layers are still very much a pipe dream, significantly increasing the blast radius concern. Option B - You run your own logging, storage, networking, database and analytics services inside the K8s which defeats the entire point of being in the cloud in the first place. Being cloud agnostic is a great pipe dream, but the economics of running an abstraction layer (Pivotal / Openshift / Mesos) vs cost of exit just doesn't add up for 99% of companies. Just use the native FaaS/Data/Analytics.

jelling 8y ago
Great analysis. I think of it as avoiding the DevOps explosion and it drives me nuts when I see early stage companies sinking lots of time into getting the perfect setup of what is actually just a cost center. There's likely some strained argument for how this ultimately might benefit the customer but that ROI is a long way off, and if you're still in business.
- state_less 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. If I were a typical small (startup) company, I'd run on top of Kubernetes with a Postgres backend, some business logic layer in a container and serve some html/js to the browser. It's fast, inexpensive and goes wherever Kubernetes does. Large organizations are a whole other animal. There will be many people entrenched in various ways, each with their own ideas of how things ought to be run. Often guided by technical debt and unique historical needs.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Proven 8y ago

It's (the idea to manage on prem K8S from the cloud) a reaction to 1) Hyperscalers doing hybrid cloud 2) VMware's growingly independent approach to K8S (which I believe will ultimately result in VMware offering "generic" Kubernetes) 3) IBM Redhat becoming more aggressive with their on-prem approach (let's not forget SoftLayer and Redhat OCP can do hybrid K8S on bare metal, without VMware) 4) On-prem-focused vendors like NetApp having announced similar service (NetApp Kubernetes Service, which already works in all hyperscalers and on-Prem NetApp HCI is next) in recent months. Pivotal's on-prem problem (compared to IBM Redhat, NetApp) is problem is they have little on-prem presence, sell no hardware or storage, and need to rely on DellEMC and VMware (which have been great for Pivotal but that was when Pivotal played nice and wasn't helping VMware (and Dell) customers escape to non-VMware based clouds.)

frou_dh 8y ago

On-prem serverless? Stone cold classic.

fuball63 8y ago

One of the reasons I prefer function as a service "FaaS" over "serverless" is because of how useful on demand ephemeral functions can be on premises. The term serverless implies that the main benefit is not having to deal with infrastructure. While that is helpful, setting up a "standard" means of event driven and stateless business logic is useful in its own right. Can you accomplish that with long running processes? Sure, as long as you are disciplined enough to do so.

PaulHoule 8y ago

My take. These kind of things face the problem that they pump entropy out of one part of the system but risk creating more overall. In fact, unless you get all the details right you will end up worse than you started. The "minimal viable product" is not minimal at all if it is going to be viable. For instance I was using Vagrant years ago and realized eventually that I didn't need 80% of what it did and that I hated the DSL. (eg. if it has to support five different ways to build your image, maybe that's a "bad smell" that none of them are good enough) Even though I was using it locally to start, I wound up using it only in AWS and I also used it to stack up systems that I put in front of the public. I wrote my own Java program that would set up a virtual server, networking, all that and write a bash cloud-init script that would run on the machine to set it up, then send a message via SQS when it was ready. If it passed tests, the system could then switch over the elastic IP to the new instance. I looked at the problem of getting it to run on other clouds and it wasn't that bad but it wasn't that good either. In AWS you have to choose a region, availability zone, VPC, subnet, disk types, and a number of details. In some cases those choices could be arbitrary but sometimes you have infrastructure that you have to hook into and you have to match that. In GCS or Azure it's basically the same but it is different, and if you want to support those platforms you have to also embody the differences in the platforms and also the differences between customer's environment. ---- Being involved with software vendors, "hybrid cloud" has a special meaning. My biz dev guy and I picked it up as part of our pitch a few years ago because we needed it. We knew we needed to support customers wherever they were, but of all the messages we tried that was the one that confused customers the most and resonated the least. "On premise" is a special case BTW, because there are many customers who have issues with privacy, security, etc. and they don't have a choice or perceive they have a choice to use public clouds. (eg. Bridgewater thinks that it is better to safer to desktop virtualize into AWS then risk people walking out with laptops, physical destruction of their HQ, etc.)