Google Cloud Functions vs OpenFaaS

Overview

Google Cloud Functions

Stacks478

Followers479

Votes25

OpenFaaS

Stacks54

Followers234

Votes17

GitHub Stars26.0K

Forks2.0K

Google Cloud Functions vs OpenFaaS: What are the differences?

Google Cloud Functions and OpenFaaS are two popular serverless computing platforms that offer a range of features and functionalities for developing and deploying event-driven applications. While both platforms have their strengths and use cases, there are several key differences between them.

Pricing Model: Google Cloud Functions follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the number of function invocations and the time it takes to execute those functions. On the other hand, OpenFaaS is an open-source platform that can be deployed on any infrastructure, allowing users to have more control over the cost aspects by choosing their own hosting provider.
Integration with Ecosystem: Google Cloud Functions is tightly integrated with Google Cloud Platform's ecosystem, providing seamless access to various managed services like Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. OpenFaaS, being an open-source solution, offers a wider range of integrations with different cloud providers and third-party services, allowing users to have more flexibility in their application architecture.
Scaling and Auto-scaling: Google Cloud Functions automatically scales the number of instances based on incoming request volume, ensuring high availability and efficient resource utilization. OpenFaaS also supports scaling, but it requires additional configuration and setup to implement auto-scaling based on metrics like CPU usage or request rate.
Deployment Options: Google Cloud Functions provides a fully managed serverless experience, where users can focus on writing the code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. OpenFaaS, being an open-source solution, can be deployed on any infrastructure, whether it's on-premises or in the cloud, giving users more control and flexibility over their deployment choices.
Community Support and Development: Google Cloud Functions is backed by Google, which has a large community of developers and extensive documentation and support resources. OpenFaaS, being an open-source project, has an active and growing community that contributes to its development and provides support through various forums and channels.
Language and Runtime Support: Google Cloud Functions supports a limited number of programming languages and runtime environments, including Node.js, Python, Java, and Go. OpenFaaS, being an open-source platform, has support for a wider range of programming languages and runtime environments, allowing users to choose the technology stack that best suits their application requirements.

In Summary, Google Cloud Functions and OpenFaaS differ in their pricing model, integration with the ecosystem, scaling capabilities, deployment options, community support, and language/runtime support.

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Advice on Google Cloud Functions, OpenFaaS

Clifford

Software Engineer at Bidvest Advisory Services

Mar 28, 2020

Decided

Run cloud service containers instead of cloud-native services

Running containers means that your microservices are not "cooked" into a cloud provider's architecture.
Moving from one cloud to the next means that you simply spin up new instances of your containers in the new cloud using that cloud's container service.
Start redirecting your traffic to the new resources.
Turn off the containers in the cloud you migrated from.

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Detailed Comparison

Google Cloud Functions	OpenFaaS
Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running	Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 26.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 2.0K
Stacks 478	Stacks 54
Followers 479	Followers 234
Votes 25	Votes 17
Pros & Cons
Pros 7 Serverless Applications 5 Its not AWS 4 Simplicity 3 Free Tiers and Trainging 2 Simple config with GitLab CI/CD Cons 1 Node.js only 0 Typescript Support 0 Blaze, pay as you go	Pros 5 Open source 4 Ease 3 Autoscaling 2 Community 2 Documentation
Integrations
Firebase Google Cloud Storage Stackdriver	Kubernetes Docker

What are some alternatives to Google Cloud Functions, OpenFaaS?

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

Serverless

Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.

Knative

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center

Nuclio

nuclio is portable across IoT devices, laptops, on-premises datacenters and cloud deployments, eliminating cloud lock-ins and enabling hybrid solutions.

Apache OpenWhisk

OpenWhisk is an open source serverless platform. It is enterprise grade and accessible to all developers thanks to its superior programming model and tooling. It powers IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe I/O Runtime, Naver, Nimbella among others.

Cloud Functions for Firebase

Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you create functions that are triggered by Firebase products, such as changes to data in the Realtime Database, uploads to Cloud Storage, new user sign ups via Authentication, and conversion events in Analytics.

AWS Batch

It enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.

Fission

Write short-lived functions in any language, and map them to HTTP requests (or other event triggers). Deploy functions instantly with one command. There are no containers to build, and no Docker registries to manage.

Related Comparisons

Google Cloud Functions vs OpenFaaS: What are the differences?

Pricing Model: Google Cloud Functions follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the number of function invocations and the time it takes to execute those functions. On the other hand, OpenFaaS is an open-source platform that can be deployed on any infrastructure, allowing users to have more control over the cost aspects by choosing their own hosting provider.
Integration with Ecosystem: Google Cloud Functions is tightly integrated with Google Cloud Platform's ecosystem, providing seamless access to various managed services like Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. OpenFaaS, being an open-source solution, offers a wider range of integrations with different cloud providers and third-party services, allowing users to have more flexibility in their application architecture.
Scaling and Auto-scaling: Google Cloud Functions automatically scales the number of instances based on incoming request volume, ensuring high availability and efficient resource utilization. OpenFaaS also supports scaling, but it requires additional configuration and setup to implement auto-scaling based on metrics like CPU usage or request rate.
Deployment Options: Google Cloud Functions provides a fully managed serverless experience, where users can focus on writing the code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. OpenFaaS, being an open-source solution, can be deployed on any infrastructure, whether it's on-premises or in the cloud, giving users more control and flexibility over their deployment choices.
Community Support and Development: Google Cloud Functions is backed by Google, which has a large community of developers and extensive documentation and support resources. OpenFaaS, being an open-source project, has an active and growing community that contributes to its development and provides support through various forums and channels.
Language and Runtime Support: Google Cloud Functions supports a limited number of programming languages and runtime environments, including Node.js, Python, Java, and Go. OpenFaaS, being an open-source platform, has support for a wider range of programming languages and runtime environments, allowing users to choose the technology stack that best suits their application requirements.

Google Cloud Functions vs OpenFaaS

Overview