What is OpenWhisk?

Donated to the Apache foundation, OpenWhisk is a robust FaaS platform originally developed by IBM and Adobe. Built atop Docker container technologies, OpenWhisk can be deployed in the cloud or on on-premises hardware. It is a platform that frees developers from worrying about managing the life cycle of their code or operations of the container runtimes that execute the code. OpenWhisk is designed to be scalable and to support massive numbers of function invocations. Currently, OpenWhisk is the engine behind IBM Cloud Functions.

The OpenWhisk scaling mechanism is not built on top of Docker Swarm or Kubernetes schedulers. It plugs directly into each Docker instance to start and scale function containers. With this design, OpenWhisk fits better with the plain Docker infrastructure than Kubernetes.

For developers, OpenWhisk provides a number of compelling features via its high-level programming model surrounding functions. Its event triggering mechanism is shown in Figure 6...