Adopting Kubernetes as a unified platform for serverless
and container workloads enables you to fully exploit and
embrace modern, cloud-native architectures.
Over the past few years, serverless and containers emerged as winners for building
modern infrastructure. Each of these technologies have their own sweet spots and chal-
lenges. Highly customized container workloads might require sophisticated orchestra-
tor infrastructure with high reliability. Serverless cloud services are limited when it
comes to application portability, barring some recent advancements, such as
OpenFaaS.
With the rise of managed Kubernetes, modern application developers are growing com-
fortable with using containers. They build and package applications in local machines,
and distribute them to different environments as container images—without worrying
about performance, scalability or the specifics of the Kubernetes implementation on a
cloud service provider.
kubernetes
Datacenter
Build Pipelines
Application
Code
App Container
Container
Registry
kubernetes
Cloud
Figure 1: Container Apps Deployment
But with serverless deployments, the developer experience is not as smooth a ride when
it comes to application packaging, portability and debugging. Developers may still need
to deal with cloud infrastructure operations, and the nitty-gritty of vendor-specific
offerings such as AWS SAM or Azure Functions plugins when it comes to troubleshoot-
ing coding errors and exceptions, cold start times, etc.
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