Serverless platforms help us to build applications and services without having to manage the infrastructure. By using a serverless platform, the developer no longer has to worry about the physical hardware concerns. These platforms are cost-effective and have enhanced agility for development. There are several serverless frameworks such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions. These serverless platforms are for computing and still require some level of management of the operating system and the web server software process. These do not handle issues of memory and storage integration with serverless compute. One platform that I came across that is handling the concerns related to memory and storage integration, is Nimbella.
On closer look: Nimbella is a serverless cloud platform that is primarily designed to address the challenges developers face in adopting serverless computing model.
One of the major challenges with the serverless frameworks of today is their lack of support for stateful applications. Stateful applications are the ones that save the data from the activities of one session which have to be used in another session. This challenge of the lack of stateful support is overcome by Nimbella. The developers using Nimbella platform only have to code the logic and the rest like the storage and resource management, logging, monitoring has to be left on Nimbella. Nimbella handles it. So, it makes things easier for the developer and this support helps to build dynamic applications. The dynamic applications need support of the server and the data keeps on changing frequently. The entire dynamic infrastructure is handled by Nimbella’s platform and the developers can do what they do best and what they love, code the business logic!
Nimbella is based on an open-source serverless platform,Apache OpenWhisk. It saves the execution sequence of a running process and its contents are updated and managed automatically by this platform. So, it helps in transferring the results of one function to the other function. Nimbella cloud is deployed on top of Kubernetes. It is done so as to build containerized applications and to normalize the variances in different clouds.
Other platforms present do not support integration. But, with Nimbella, developer does not have to worry about the integration as it is supported natively by Nimbella. Also, the other existing platforms present are not cloud portable. So, therefore if the developer at any time feels a need to change the underlying cloud, he/she has to rewrite the code again to work with new cloud vendor APIs. This problem is also solved by Nimbella as it is a cloud-agnostic serverless platform. It can run on public, private and hybrid clouds. So the code can run on all clouds or local machines or a dedicated infrastructure thus supporting public, private or hybrid clouds.
Hence, Nimbella helps developers to address the challenges they face while working in serverless computing environment. Nimbella’s literal meaning is - “Beautiful Cloud” and surely it makes sense as Nimbella makes our serverless cloud computing experience beautiful.