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by rolandboon 2750 days ago
Your argument against serverless functions holds for AWS Lambda, but this Gitlab feature is based on Knative. That's an open source serverless platform based on Kubernetes.

I think all money Amazon is throwing at serverless is to build a foundation to ultimately transform all their "managed" services into a serverless form. They already released serverless RDS (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/).

2 comments

Good to know that it's open source. I should have looked it up first.

My understanding of Serverless was that it was synonymous with 'Functions as a Service'. What Knative seems to be doing is more like 'Backend as a Service'. I guess it's good to know that these two very different approaches are now both labeling themselves as 'Serverless'. I guess Knative is just hitchhiking on top of Amazon's marketing success around the 'Serverless' term.

I'm fairly certain that under the hood serverless RDS is just "intelligently and dynamically adjusting the instance type with zero downtime" though, not really technically interesting compared to Lambda-serverless.