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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Zappa author here, very excited by this project!

We've been planning on supporting other DIY/non-AWS offerings in this space - particularly IBM's OpenWhisk[1]. If the Fission authors are here - can I ask how the two stack up? OpenWhisk's ability to write your own custom even sources seems like a leg up, as does their wider language support, but Fissions's Kubernetes foundation seems preferable. Curious how the two compare!

[0] https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa [1] https://developer.ibm.com/openwhisk/

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Hi there, it would be awesome to have Zappa support Fission, happy to talk more about it!

We're working on a detailed comparison with Openwhisk, but basically -- we bet on Kubernetes as a good foundation to build this on, and it seems to be going well so far. It's true that we're at an earlier project maturity stage than Openwhisk is. In particular, we're actively working on integrating event sources and adding support for more languages.

Awesome!

Can you talk more about Fission Router? This seems to be where most of the hand-waving is happening right now :) AWS API Gateway doesn't get very much love, but it is actually a very important part of the server-less ecosystem.

Why did you write your own Router and not make an nGinx plugin, for instance? How well does it scale? How do you deploy it? What features does it have?

Agree on the importance of API gateway.

Feature-wise, fission router is very simple right now. It's a service based on gorilla/mux. We had to write our own router because of cold-starts -- basically, the router needs to be able to talk to the pool manager and to get an instance when one doesn't exist, while holding on to the incoming request. (I'm not sure how much of this is possible to write as an nginx plugin.)

I don't have perf numbers just yet, but the router is stateless and you can just run more replicas when you reach its limit. It caches results from the rest of fission components, and most requests are on this fast path.

(We're also thinking about adding some existing feature-ful API proxy in front of the router, to get stuff like authentication, rate limiting, etc.)

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