AWS Lambda vs Knative vs Serverless: What are the differences?

Introduction

AWS Lambda, Knative, and Serverless are all cloud computing services that allow developers to build and deploy applications without the need to provision or manage servers. However, there are key differences between these three services that make them unique in their own ways.

1. Deployment Options: AWS Lambda allows you to deploy your code as a function in the AWS Lambda service, which is fully managed by Amazon Web Services. Knative, on the other hand, provides a Kubernetes-based platform that enables you to deploy your code as containers, allowing for more flexibility and portability. Serverless provides a framework that abstracts away the infrastructure layer and allows you to deploy your code as functions in a variety of cloud providers, including AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Azure Functions.

2. Event Sources: AWS Lambda supports a wide range of event sources, including HTTP requests, S3 bucket events, DynamoDB streams, and more. Knative provides a similar event-driven architecture, but it is primarily designed to work with Kubernetes-native events. Serverless, being a framework, allows you to define event sources based on the cloud provider you are using, giving you the flexibility to choose from a wide range of options.

3. Managed Services Integration: AWS Lambda integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, and more. Knative provides a similar level of integration with Kubernetes-native services and resources. Serverless, being a framework, offers integrations with multiple cloud providers, allowing you to leverage the managed services provided by each platform.

4. Scaling: AWS Lambda and Knative both provide automatic scaling capabilities, allowing your code to scale up or down based on the incoming workload. AWS Lambda has a default limit of 1,000 concurrent executions per region, which can be increased upon request. Knative, being built on Kubernetes, leverages the Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to scale your containers based on the defined metrics. Serverless, being a framework, abstracts away the scaling mechanism, allowing you to focus on writing your code without worrying about the scaling implementation.

5. Pricing Model: AWS Lambda charges you based on the number of invocations and the duration of the function executions. Knative, being an open-source project, does not have any direct pricing model, but you would incur costs for the underlying resources, such as Kubernetes clusters. Serverless, being a framework, allows you to choose from multiple cloud providers, each with its own pricing model. It provides cost optimization features, such as cold start reduction and request pooling, to help reduce costs.

6. Vendor Lock-In: AWS Lambda and Knative both tie you to their respective cloud platforms, AWS and Kubernetes. Serverless, being a framework that supports multiple cloud providers, allows you to write serverless applications that are vendor-agnostic, giving you the flexibility to switch between cloud providers without significant code changes.

In summary, AWS Lambda, Knative, and Serverless are all powerful tools for building and deploying serverless applications, but they differ in their deployment options, event sources, managed services integration, scaling mechanisms, pricing models, and vendor lock-in.