https://talkingserverless.com/2020/07/23/is-open-source-even-relevant-in-serverless/
open source projects like OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus, competing against the Infrastructure as a Service offering from AWS. They failed miserably because the advantage of cloud computing was in the outsourcing of data center capital expenditure and operations.
(emphasis mine)
While Heroku, Google App Engine stagnated after getting initial developer mindshare, OSS offerings like OpenShift and CloudFoundry gained developer traction as well as enterprise adoption. Their success could be adopted to the fact that enterprise customers wanted to have a PaaS like abstraction that could span both on-premises as well as public cloud.
Both GAE and Heroku were / are different app building paradigms.
The last bit is covered elsewhere: enterprise thought they wanted to run their own cloud or go hybrid, and neither GAE or Heroku made their stacks available to self-host.
So Docker / Containers won, because no paradigm shift in how apps are built AND enough open source available.
OSS cannot compete head to head with FaaS. Developers would rather not have any operational overhead than managing the open-source serverless layer. FaaS is a clear winner against open source equivalents just like how IaaS made open-source cloud infrastructure software irrelevant.
aka “most developers don’t want to be ops people”
There are three areas pointed out at the end of the article:
- “higher-order developer frameworks on top of FaaS” — like Arc / begin.com on top of AWS Lambda
- multi-cloud support — I don’t really believe in this one
- serverless optimized for K8S