At the Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced a preview version of OpenShift Cloud Functions, a serverless computing platform based on Apache OpenWhisk. Serverless computing allows developers to run code in cloud computing environments without having to configure or manage cloud instances.
Many of the leading cloud computing vendors offer serverless services, but their tools don’t always support hybrid clouds and may lead to vendor lock-in. Richard Sharples, senior director of product management for Red Hat, blogged, “We believe that having a serverless offering in our portfolio is essential if we want to be able to provide developers with a modern, full-featured application development stack for a hybrid cloud. We also want to stay true to the ethos of freedom. Yet, one of the biggest risks that is inherent with the traditional serverless model is that the user’s applications and data can become locked into a single cloud infrastructure provider, putting their business at the mercy of whichever cloud provider they originally chose.”
